After all the pointless flame wars on this website I wanted to tackle some less divisive topics, therefore I have decided to create a short post discussing the failure of alliance structures in the Middle East (including Pakistan going by the World Bank definition). The alliances we will actually look at being the METO/CENTO/Baghdad Pact, SEATO, and the two recent pacts between Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan with Turkey being the most recent entrant.

(P.S. XTM can you add an Active Author Category for me.)

Colonial Legacies

The borders of the Middle East have been drawn rather unnaturally like almost any decolonized part of the world. However, the region has been plagued with conflict since almost time immemorial. The reality of national border is that creating perfect borders according to the distribution of populations is a fraught task which is bound to lead to an almost unending series of wars. Therefore, regardless of colonialism the borders of a nation state will create frictions with other states and blaming Mortimer Durand, Mark Sykes, François Georges-Picot and myriad other colonial era diplomats will simply derail the discussion beyond its scope. I acknowledge their faults contributing to the unstable nature of many states in the region however do not think of them as the root cause for the instability.

Failure of CENTO/METO/Baghdad Pact

CENTO initially started in 1955 as the Baghdad Pact between Turkey and Iraq as a way of keeping the Soviet Union out of the Middle East. In time it admitted the UK which occupied several territories in the Middle East shortly after. Slowly the Alliance expanded to house Iran, and Pakistan as well.

The reason for its failure are almost multiple however the root cause seems to always end up being the infighting and instability endemic to the Middle East. The grouping became disillusioned when Pakistan tried to invoke some help during the 1965 and 1971 wars against India. Aid was provided by the organization’s members in individual capacities however it was all short of actually becoming a cobelligerent in the conflict against India. Another point of friction became the Turkish invasion of Cyprus which led to the UK withdrawing from the alliance.

The final nail in its coffin was the Iranian Revolution of 1979 which sealed its fate as in short order Iran, Pakistan, UK and Turkey all exited the alliance structure.

Military Failure of SEATO

SEATO was created for a similar objective to CENTO as anti-communist, anti-Soviet Pact headed by Western Powers to guard South East Asian colonies. However, in comparison to CENTO it involved a much larger colonial overhang. Its main members were Australia, US, UK, France, Pakistan, and Thailand. Unlike CENTO which vanished away in a blaze of glory no one single event could be identified which ended SEATO but instead a culmination of events led to its demise.

In 1971 Pakistan lost its Eastern Province which became Bangladesh. Therefore, it lost any weight it might’ve had in South East Asia making the Pact beyond its scope. It officially withdrew from the pact in 1973. Soon after which France withdrew from the Pact due to its loss in Vietnam. This led to the pact later being dissolved in 1977.

Military Failure of Saudi-Pakistan Pact (SMDA)

The Saudi-Pakistan Pact was signed on 7 September 2025. It began as a way for the two nations to come to each other’s defense using collective security. Any attack on one nation would be considered as an attack against both. The pact was initially a reaction to the Israeli bombing of Qatar which killed several Hamas leaders.

The pact was tested during the Pakistani-Afghan conflict in the same year. This conflict showed the unequal nature of this treaty where the Pakistani border hostility would be replied to by the Saudi govt with call of peace. While, any hostility against the Saudis by Iran or any of its proxies would end up requiring the deployment of Pakistani troops and equipment on Saudi soil as at least a show of force if not for actual war fighting.

The Inevitable Failure of the Mecca Defense Pact

The Saudi-Pakistan pact was recently extended into a Trilateral Pact on 7th August 2026 to include Turkey into the mix. The alliance seems to mimic the natural expansion of bilateral alliance into a multilateral alliance as seen in CENTO. However, the alliance has already been test in around 48 hours of its signing by the Houthis in Yemen who have decided to fire on Saudi infrastructure.

Although the Pact remains nominally anti-Israeli in nature, the real enemy it wishes to triangulate against is Iran. It has also been called a Sunni NATO or an Islamic NATO. Although other organizations have had similar monikers but they all have had the same failing.

The Faults in Collective Defense

To demonstrate the inherently uncertain and unreliable nature of collective defense I shall quote the Article 5 from NATO as none of the treaties signed between Saudi Arabia-Pakistan-Turkey are currently publicly available.

Article 5

The Parties agree that an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all and consequently they agree that, if such an armed attack occurs, each of them, in exercise of the right of individual or collective self-defence recognised by Article 51 of the Charter of the United Nations, will assist the Party or Parties so attacked by taking forthwith, individually and in concert with the other Parties, such action as it deems necessary, including the use of armed force, to restore and maintain the security of the North Atlantic area.

Any such armed attack and all measures taken as a result thereof shall immediately be reported to the Security Council. Such measures shall be terminated when the Security Council has taken the measures necessary to restore and maintain international peace and security .

Even Article 5 the gold standard for collective defense relies more upon the collective faith the nations place upon it rather than any firm guarantee that an attack on one nation shall be an attack on all. As nations are free to pursue actions they deem fit, this may include use of the armed forces however it doesn’t necessarily have to which means in a difficult situation such an alliance structure lacks the binding nature to be relied upon. Furthermore, it forces no actions of economic coercion on any of the signatories against the nations which triggers Article 5.

The death nail for any military expectations from this alliance has been that it is clearly created to counter Iran’s increasing influence on the Middle East. Although, none of the nations can even clearly state this in any of their statements. Out of the 3 signatories of the treaty only Pakistan directly borders Iran and it will take any and all actions necessary to stay out of a direct conflict with Iran. To the point where it will completely abandon its ally Saudi Arabia to act as an intermediary or mediator in the Saudi conflict against Iran. This is simply due to the strategic calculus of already being burdened by 2 hostile fronts and not being able to afford a 3rd hostile front for Pakistan.

Although the three nations may tout their varying advantages as bringing different strengths to the table the real weakness it displays is an inherent inability to operate along with each other. Turkey is a NATO member therefore has at least some degree of standardization in its equipment along with Saudi Arabia which procures most of its equipment from the US as well. However, a large portion of Pakistani equipment originates from China which is bound to not play well when forced to operate with almost entirely NATO compatible armies. Furthermore, the economic differences between the three nations will make further military integration difficult beyond some basic drone integration.

Regardless, I do not believe that Pakistan will be the reason for the failure of the Mecca Pact. Historically speaking the reasons for the destruction of such pacts is due to Revolution in a signatory, the liberation of a signatory’s territories, and inherently diverging strategic interests of all signatory nations. In a long enough timeline the strategic misalignments between Turkey and Saudi Arabia will be reason enough to tear this alliance of convenience apart.

The goal of this post will be to act as a counter to XTM’s post about geography not being power. It will rely on realism as a doctrine of international relations to de-cypher the significance geography has had on the Indian Subcontinent and how it has affected the trajectories of the nations within it.

Geography initially reared its head in discussions of strategy during the times of Mackinder and Mahan in the early 1900s. Where Mackinder so boldly stated that “Who rules East Europe commands the Heartland; who rules the Heartland commands the World-Island; who rules the World-Island commands the world.”. However, these words were written in colonial era Britain as a device to fear monger about the Russians as they were the perfect counter to their strategy of controlling the world with sea power through internal lines of transportation through Cold Siberia. With that cold logic Russia which had been the ally of British through the two world wars became a target.

Spykman gave that theoretical logic into a more reasonable and pragmatic form for a new form of American Empire. He realized that for all its insulated impenetrability the heartland was a vast and uninhabitable land with little to no permanent lines of transportation that the British feared about. However, it was instead the powers which surrounded the heartland that could instrumentalize it. Therefore, the areas of concern on the Eurasian world island suddenly expanded from Eastern Europe to the Inner Crescent or the Rimlands. These were the fertile plains of the Indian Subcontinent, the deserts of Arabia, the East Asian lands of China and other East Asian nations, and The European peninsula. “States, cannot escape their geography. However skilled the Foreign Office, and however resourceful the General Staff. A state’s foreign policy must reckon with geographic facts. It can deal with them skillfully or ineptly; it can modify them; but it cannot ignore them. For geography does not argue. It simply is.”

America therefore to sustain its own global empire created various treaty organizations to control the rimlands. NATO, SEATO, CENTO (Baghdad Pact), etc to perpetuate its own influence in the rimland to contain the Soviets during the cold war to reduce their influence over the world island. During that time Pakistan utilized its geography to turn a soviet misadventure into a disaster by creating, sheltering, training, and equipping the Mujahideen in Afghanistan. It became a de-facto frontier state against the Soviets. It repeated the same strategy of renting out its geographical position to great powers during the GWOT. Therefore, it would not be inaccurate to say that Geography has been a core part of Pakistani strategy so much so that the words like “Geostrategy, Geoeconomics and Geopolitics” are a part of common parlance.

Pakistan finds itself in relevance again due to its own geographic placement on the rimlands. It is populated enough to be a player and subservient enough to be valuable to any power on the world island or beyond. If India simply didn’t exist Pakistan would’ve been a very different place, it could’ve looked to the deserts of Arabia as an actual partner nation instead of a “security guard” for the Arabs. It could’ve had an actual relationship with Afghanistan instead of the constant insecurity at its frontiers. It could’ve had an actual foreign policy beyond just holding the threat of nuclear weapons up to western nations for the sake of foreign aid.

India for its own part also wishes to imagine a world where Pakistan wouldn’t have existed. It would’ve freed India to have lines of transportation going directly in Central Asia and Russia some of their closest partners historically. It would also open up so much of Indian capacity which goes into deterring Pakistan and could instead be used to project power out into the Indian Ocean its own playground. India would’ve been free of 2-front scenario that constantly rises in the minds of Indian strategic planners no matter how unlikely it might be.

We can see that the Indian Subcontinent today can be home to an actual challenger to the already existing global order unlike during the time of Spykman’s analysis which assumed the subcontinent was too poor to be an actor of its own. However, that requires the subcontinent to have a clear hegemon. India can take that place given enough time to develop its own economy, however the tumultuous nature of the global economy shows clear headwinds against that. In the absence of a clear hegemon the subcontinent will go back to the its original state of being in a balance of powers where outside powers balance against India using Pakistan as a proxy to deter a possible hegemon from emerging. For Pakistan the origins of its significance are its geography due to the absence of any economic prosperity.

A point of leverage which has emerged out of the geography as international law weakens and multi-lateral agreements become tougher to enforce is the Indus Waters Treaty. India’s abeyance of the treaty is contested globally yet there is no consequence for its actions. Many courts may decry the humanity but no nation is willing to punish it for the business its markets represent. Even the Americans and Chinese have largely been silent on this issue making the pitch for its restoration more difficult for the Pakistanis. In a world where every multilateral institution that could ever matter has been humiliated by Trump and actively disregarded its a bit rich to state things such as “There are no exit clauses to the IWT” because even the Treaty of Versailles didn’t have an exit clause in the sense that Germany could remilitarize the Rhine through it. However, great power can rarely ever be bound into certain actions by other powers for long, the IWT persisted beyond its expiry date due to the fact that the Indian capability to build on the Western rivers was rather limited. However, those facts are changing due to the rising nature of India’s economic and industrial capabilities.

Although, I do not expect India to magically develop the capabilities to dam up the Indus for months or something to that effect. The real capabilities we could see coming into effect would be re-directing portions of the Indus into the Eastern Rivers and then damming those rivers up more comprehensively. The total capacity which can be redirect through such an arrangement would be rather limited. It would barely cross the 20% mark on the Indus’ waters. However, in a world where the flows of the Indus are declining every additional capacity of water that India absorbs is an addition to Pakistan’s water scarcity problem.

Finally, Pakistan has worked to stress out any groundwater supplies that may have existed under its lands. It’s cities live in constant water scarcity, many cities like Karachi have declared national security emergency due to water scarcity already. In the coming years we may see a return of geography’s wrath, as large parts of Pakistan become even more uninhabitable for life. As overpopulation in cities means the average person has to sink larger and larger portions of their incomes into simply giving out rents to the “tanker mafia”. The curse of geography is such for Pakistan that the Indus River System is its only replenishing source of water for most of its population. Therefore, Pakistan might threaten the world with a gun to its head for water but in reality the IWT isn’t even the greatest of its water concerns. IWT is just a way for it to shift the blame for its crumbling water infrastructure failing to service the needs of its populations with no sign or possibility of improvement as the state turned rather comprehensively from a “developmental” state to a “hard” state. With budget prioritizing military expenditure over the expenditure for schools, roads, rail, and even water.

Indus Waters Treaty was signed in 19 Sept 1960 between India and Pakistan under mediation provided by the World Bank. As a political compromise between Pakistan and India seemed improbable the US and UK decided to pressure both into signing onto a technical treaty which could outline the claims and limits of both nations on the flow of the water. Over the years it was touted at the most successful and unequal water sharing agreement where the upper riparian nation only made claim to a minor portion of the river’s waters.

The Indus basin was categorized into two groups of rivers. With the Eastern Rivers (Beas, Ravi, and Sutlej) being controlled by India and the Western Rivers (Indus, Chenab and Jhelum) being controlled by Pakistan.

Many still blame Nehru for this treaty in India for only allowing India to control less than 20% of the Indus’ waters, while many in Pakistan still decry the unequal nature of the treaty in directly awarding a set of rivers to India as that may eventually cause droughts in the parts of Pakistan which are mainly fed by the Eastern rivers. However, the main calls for renegotiations of the treaty have originated in India which at this point has put it into ‘abeyance’. In this post we will go through the main areas of dispute in the treaty and what the possible solutions for the current impasse may be.

Points of Dispute

Hierarchy of Dispute Resolution

One of the major points of contention between India and Pakistan in the Indus Waters Treaty is which method of dispute resolution should be utilized. India opines that a neutral expert is best equipped to provide a judgement on any dispute as the treaty was created as a technical document divvying up the river system. As the technological leaps which have occurred since the signing of the treaty are such that only a technical expert could decipher which portions of a dam project are adhering to the spirit of the treaty and which are not. Pakistan opines that the court of arbitration remains the best method for the settlement of any dispute as it ensures both parties adhere to the limitations set on dam construction and that water use in the upper riparian are limited to irrigation, power production and no excessive storage occurs at any dam project.

India claims that the entire treaty has been used by Pakistan as a tool to delay and alter any project on the Indus. To the point that even the Eastern Rivers which India has had complete claims over remains underutilized. This had gotten to a point in 2016 where over a dam project both the neutral expert and the court of arbitrations were consulted with both providing contradicting verdicts.

Distribution of Water

The Indus Waters Treaty remains the most unequal treaty in terms of water distribution. The main claim on the Indian side has been that due to a change in population on their side of the border their requirements for water have risen but the treaty remains largely in the past. The water flowing through the Indus River Systems has only declined as times goes on. Therefore, a new bargain needs to be struck to make the treaty viable for the future for either sides.

Pakistan affirms that population has risen more significantly across their side of the border, therefore their claims over the waters are more important now. Furthermore, they claim that giving over the entire claim over the Eastern Rivers to India was a massive failure of their predecessors. Pakistan therefore also asks claims over a portion of the Eastern Rivers to ensure that there isn’t any drought caused on their side due to a complete redirection of the Eastern Rivers as stated in certain claims by Indian politicians.

Colonial Nature of the Treaty

Perhaps the least commented on portion of this treaty is its inherently colonial nature. The treaty was negotiated in the good offices of the World Bank an American Institution, it was clearly an objective of the USA and UK’s governments to ensure the viability of their client states in Pakistan. Even today the governments of the US and UK are deeply involved in the selection Engineer Members, and Legal Members which are involved in the dispute resolution portion of the treaty. It would future proof the treaty further if these positions were devolved to the main participants of the treaty.

Through Indian eyes this treaty is almost written by a colonial master on unequal terms. Now, that India is no longer in a state of Ship-to-mouth existence it needs to shed these clearly colonial features of the treaty. Pakistan might find this portion of the treaty not as excusable due to the fact that the member states with these influence have often been close allies of theirs through formal treaties such as (SEATO, CENTO or the Baghdad Pact) and both the powers sent aircraft carriers (HMS Eagle and USS Enterprise) to intimidate India in 1971.

Possible Future Scenarios

At this point the chances of an Amended treaty are going to require deft negotiations from the Pakistani side as many projects on the Western Rivers in Indian territory have already begun to spring up. Therefore, the chances for a “Permanent Abeyance” or “Total Disregard” remain most likely.

Indus Waters Treaty Amended

This is an ideal scenario in which all that track-2 level diplomacy leads to fruitful results. Where the treaty is examined by both sides and amended to ensure that the points of conflicts that led to its abeyance are sufficiently allayed such that they won’t lead to any future suspension or abeyance.

In this scenario the water distribution either changes nominally (giving both sides minor claims to waters from both set of rivers while maintain a similar distribution of water) or remains the same. However, the main dispute is resolved which is the hierarchy of dispute resolution. In a scenario where Pakistan has the upper hand it would ensure the court of arbitration is the highest, in the case where India holds all the cards as the upper riparian it will be the neutral expert.

If the amendments are ambitious it could even tackle the colonial nature of the treaty excising any influence of former colonial powers from the treaty. Making it not just future proof but even more closely aligned to the Indian policy affirmed in the Shimla Agreement.

Permanent Abeyance

The Indian government finds this scenario particularly enticing. As it isn’t directly suspending the treaty while side stepping all its cumbersome dispute resolution mechanism. It can easily ignore any rulings from International Courts as they have little to no jurisdiction over the country. It allows the state to have a good level of ambiguity in decision-making which many bureaucrats appreciate. It leaves a card up their sleeve which they can use to entice Pakistan during a future crisis.

On the Pakistani side this is a dreaded option as it removes any influence they might’ve had over the construction on the Indian side. Projects which previously might’ve been delayed and altered for decades will be suddenly out of their influence. But the most devastating will be the lack of data sharing which would affect the planning of crop seasons. This uncertainty could’ve been reduced to a degree if a larger number of dams were to be constructed on the Indus however as a “hard” state Pakistan rarely has any resources to spare for non-military projects of this magnitude.

Total Disregard

The most extreme of all options would be a total disregard for the treaty. Instead of acting like the treaty is only in abeyance which means the claims over the Rivers remain static in principle. Meaning India has limited influence over the Western Rivers. In this scenario a large build up of projects begins on both the set of Rivers. A number of river connection, dams, and reservoir projects spring up to capture water from the Indus. Large tunnels of 30-40kms are built up to join river water of the Indus towards Uttarakhand and Rajasthan through canals ensuring that more than 20% of the waters from the Indus River System never reach across the border.

Any construction of dams or reservoirs on the Western Rivers would tilt the world towards this scenario. As once the construction is complete no incumbent government will ever have any incentive to adhere to the old treaty ever again. Meaning once a project is constructed it will become a permanent fixture, Once a river is redirected to a canal it cannot be turned off, because anyone who turns it off will commit political suicide.

Projects like the Chenab-Beas link tunnel are inching up towards this reality. Where Pakistan’s claims over the Western Rivers are diluted through rather small and insignificant projects over long periods of time. In its current state the link tunnel doesn’t even transport 1 MAF of water from the Chenab to the Beas, however, it demonstrates a principle that Pakistan holds no influence over Indian construction on its claimed river waters.

Conclusion

Every day that passes without any open negotiation between the governments of India and Pakistan on the issue of the Indus Waters Treaty is a day where we move closer towards the scenario of “Total Disregard”. Personally, I wouldn’t want this issue to get to a point where Indian leaders jockey to claim larger and larger portions of Pakistan’s waters for the sake of their local constituencies and jingoistic sentiments. The effect this treaty’s abeyance has over Pakistan isn’t as large as most would assume due to a short-to-medium term effects on the Indus’ waters however in the long term it might reduce millions into poverty due to the rising cost of water.

I’d love to know your thoughts on this! What real talking points do you think we can pull from this issue? Also, let me know if there’s a blind spot I completely missed that needs to be addressed.

Hey folks, this will be my first article on Brown Pundits. Hope you guys enjoy it! Any recommendations regarding future topics, books, or just critique on the article itself will be greatly appreciated!

Tilak Devasher is a former Special Secretary, Cabinet Secretariat Government of India. He is now known as a prolifically researcher on Pakistan in India. 10 years ago he began his scholarly journey with Pakistan: Courting the Abyss. As I was going through the book I wished there was a 10 year retrospective on his work which would help us determine how well his work has held with time. So, I’ve decided to undertake that task myself.

I will largely stray away from the sections involving historiography as that is not where my expertise lies. I will instead look to compare the numbers provided in the literature in order to determine the accuracy of the trajectories being prescribed in the book. Therefore, I will not be looking into the Ideology of Pakistan (Nazaria-i-Pakistan), The Muslim League or the Pakistan Movement. Due to this reason I will also not be commenting the origins of the Balochistan insurgency, or other provincial issues based on history.

The Army

The most stark feature of the army is the overrepresentation of Punjabis in the rank of its officers while its underrepresentation in the ranks of its troops. Along with the rising radicalism seen within not just the troops but among the officers as well. It would be unthinkable for the army chief of the nation to have prided himself on memorizing the quran just a few decades ago.

Shuja Nawaz notes a decline in the percentage of representation of soldiers from Punjab, between 1990 and 2005, from 63.86 per cent to 43.33 per cent, but that of the officers rising from 66.46 to 66.93 per cent. Within Punjab there was a shift to the more populous and emerging urban centres of central and even southern Punjab. These bigger cities and towns were also the traditional strongholds of the growing Islamist parties and conservatism, associated with the petit bourgeoisie. [1]

The Rise of Radicalism

An aspect of Pakistani radicalism on display is the differences between the Shia, and the Sunni (Deobandi). There has been spate of attacks on Shias by Sunnis in Pakistan most recent of which can be considered the bombing of a Mosque in Islamabad which killed at least 30 people an injured more than 169. These sentiments seem to be encouraged by a plurality of Muslims who believe that Shia are non-Muslims.

Ominously, a 2012 Pew Global Survey showed that 41 per cent of the respondents in Pakistan believed that Shias were non-Muslim. As sectarianism takes deeper roots, the question of what is true Islam has taken on greater salience. Since Shias are seen as diverging from mainstream (Sunni) Islam, their killing seems to attract less sympathy, adding to the impunity of the killers.

Madrasas

Madrasas pose several challenges. First, according to Interior Minister Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan, ‘90 per cent of madrasas had no connection to terrorism, based on intelligence reports received’.[3] On another occasion he was at pains to point out that his government was not painting all seminaries with the same brush; he said that ‘around 10 per cent of madaris were involved in terror activities’.[4] This would imply that 10 per cent of the madrasas, where anywhere between 150,000 and 300,000 students study (estimates vary hugely about the total number of students studying in madrasas) could be potential terrorists. Even if 1 per cent of them were to become suicide bombers, there could well be around 3,000 potential suicide bombers waiting to blow themselves up. Even if they do not blow themselves up, the limited education they have received would make them dysfunctional members of society, prone to being incited to violence.

Madrasas are a direct consequence of a state lacking capacity to educate all its youth. Because of which many will flock to madrasas which are unqualified, often unregistered and incapable of handling a modern curriculum. The reality also is that due to radical madrasas going out of their way to avoid any kind of registration we have no idea how many madrasas are operating in Pakistan. According to estimates from a decade ago there are at least 35,000 Madrasas in total operating in Pakistan with around 26000 being registered serving around 2-3 million children.

In 2014, according to the interior ministry, there were at least 22,052 registered madrasas in Pakistan, but there was no record of the unregistered ones. According to a July 2015 report titled ‘The Madrassa Conundrum — The state of religious education in Pakistan’, the number of madrasas in Pakistan had crossed 35,000.[5]

However, the only contestation to the awfulness of the Madrasa system is that vast majority of violent terrorists come out of the public schooling system with little to no exposure to the Madrasa system. However, that would ignore the fact that less than 10% of Pakistan’s children are enrolled in Madrasas. Meaning there is a 4 times overrepresentation of Madrasa graduates in terrorism according to Christine Fair.

Christine Fair, for example, noted that while madrasas proved to be a hotbed for disseminating ideology, they were not a major source of militant recruitment. Of the 141 cases studied by her, less than a quarter, thirty-three of 141 ever attended theological schools. Of those thirty-three madrasa products, twenty-seven attended a madrasa for four or fewer years, and most also attended public schools. In contrast, the remaining eighty-two were well educated by Pakistani standards, at least a matriculate.6 Another survey of ten major jihadi groups revealed that of the over 15,000 people from Punjab who died in Afghanistan and Kashmir only 40 per cent had actually studied in madrasas.

Terrorism

Pakistan would do well to refer to the 2008 study of the Rand Corporation of 648 terrorist groups existing between 1968 and 2006. The study found that military operations resulted in the elimination of terrorist groups only in seven cases whereas 40 per cent of the groups were crushed through police and intelligence work and 43 per cent renounced militancy by joining political parties. Military force has rarely been the primary reason for the end of terrorist groups. While it acknowledged the importance of hard force, especially against large and well-organized groups, it also stressed a range of policy instruments including policing and intelligence networks.7 This element is largely absent in Pakistan.

The rise of Terrorism in Pakistan has been its most apparent feature in the recent past. The book correctly identifies the TTP as being a large issue in terrorism in the KPK. However, the book could’ve never expected the quantum of increases now visible across Pakistan because of the rise of the Taliban in Afghanistan. Regardless the end to terrorism doesn’t seem to be in the cards in short-term as there has been no acknowledgement of the detriments of using non-state actors as state policy in Pakistan.

However, stopping the use of such elements as instruments of state policy will only be the start. It will have to be followed up by dismantling the infrastructure of jihad – the madrasa network, the training camps – and provision of jobs, after a period of re-educating the madrasa graduates and changing the mindset in government schools. This would mean massive investment in industry and agriculture to create jobs and in education to provide modern education. Pakistan would have to build a counter-narrative to join the battle against the Islamic hardliners and present a viable alternative. Unfortunately, Pakistan has yet to acknowledge, let alone deal with, the ideology of hatred and militancy that has been cultivated as state policy for over four decades. Given that for decades the Pakistan has viewed jihadis as an instrument of state policy against India, it will be extremely difficult to change that policy in the immediate future, or even medium term. With terrorism continuing to fester internally, Pakistan’s slide on the slippery road towards the abyss will hasten in the years to come.

WEEP Analysis

Water:

The availability of water is changing due to climate change, change in rainfall pattern, melting of glaciers, etc., as borne out by the trends of water availability. A statistical comparison of surface water availability between the last thirty and ten years points towards declining water flows. While average flows for the years 1978 to 2008 equal 140 MAF, the same for 1998–2008 is 128.52 MAF. In years without super floods (four out of five years), average flows have declined from 135.6 MAF during 1978–2008 to 123 MAF during 1998–2008. The highest river inflow in the last three decades was 172.10 MAF in 1977–78; the highest inflow since 1998 has been 152.69 MAF in 2006–07.8

The book doesn’t go into any details regarding the Indus Waters Treaty which has now been put into abeyance. I tend to agree with it on that fact, IWT remains only a minor issue for Pakistan. The real problem lies on the rapidly rising population which will inevitably mean water scarcity for most of its citizenry. My views on the IWT and the water situation in Pakistan is that it will be another drain on the foreign exchange reserves of the nation as imported grain, and produce will work to substitute the lack of water in the nation by importing it through goods which Pakistan will no longer be able to be self-sufficient on in the future. These ideas are better detailed in a substack article on virtual water.

However, this will inevitably mean a shift away from crops like sugarcane, rice, and a shift towards cash crops which demand a greater value in the international market which can be used to subsidize the inevitable grain imports. It would unironically mean Pakistan having to move away from a halal diet to a satvik diet for the sake of maintaining their foreign exchange reserves.

The UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) measures the pressure on national water resources by calculating water withdrawal as a percentage of total renewable water resources (TRWR). Stresses are considered high if the TRWR value is above 25 per cent. Pakistan’s water pressure amounts to a staggering 74 per cent. This pressure is exorbitant even compared with neighbouring high-pressured countries, including India at 34 per cent and Afghanistan at 31 per cent.[9]

Education:

In absolute terms, half of the country’s out-of-school children – about 52 per cent – live in Punjab, 25 per cent in Sindh, 10 per cent in KPK, 7 per cent in Balochistan, and six per cent in other parts. In terms of proportion, Balochistan and Sindh are home to the highest proportion of out-of-school children. As many as 66 per cent of children in Balochistan and 51 per cent in Sindh are out of school, followed by Punjab and KPK with 47 per cent and 34 per cent out-of-school children respectively. Speaking in Quetta recently, the adviser to the Balochistan chief minister Sardar Raza Barrech said that 1.6 million children were out of school in the province, two-thirds of whom were girls.10

The Education situation in Pakistan is so grim that outside of Afghanistan and Sub-Saharan Africa it has no competition in youth literacy numbers. When the next generations of India, Bangladesh and Nepal will have almost 95% literacy rates, Pakistani Punjab doesn’t even reach 90%. Meaning even regional backwaters like Sylhet in Bangladesh are more literate than Pakistan’s most literate province.

Economy:

There are many grim statistics regarding Pakistan however, I want to remind everyone that even fundamentalist militaristic juntas in other parts of the world have better track records of economic management than Pakistan. The issues Pakistan faces are uniquely awful in that regard. In an already lengthy review if I could bring your attention to a specific set of paragraphs it would be the impact that being a security state has brought to Pakistan and the horrid future that holds for it if it remains determined on the trajectory towards becoming a ‘hard state’.

During its first three decades, Pakistan was a ‘development state’, wherein the state agenda pursued by all governments – civilian and military – was economic development. This period was marked by large-scale asset creation (dams, irrigation systems, highways, power plants, industrial complexes, factories, etc.). The ‘security state’ replaced the ‘development state’ in 1977 as a result of which economic development ceased to be the primary agenda of the state. The period was marked by a failure to invest in additional capital formation as well as lack of replacement investment in economic assets created earlier. Brief attempts to revive the ‘development state’ it in 1990s proved futile.11

This is proved statistically by the fact that during the 1970s, the real rate of growth of development expenditure was 21 per cent per annum and the rate of growth of defence expenditure was 2 per cent. During the 1980s, the rate of growth of development expenditure crashed sevenfold to 3 per cent and the rate of growth of defence expenditure escalated almost fivefold to 9 per cent. As a percentage of GDP, development expenditure has been falling from 9 per cent in the 1970s to 7.3 per cent in the 1980s to 4.7 per cent in the 1990s and to 3.5 per cent in the first decade of the millennium. Currently it is 3.2 per cent.

Population:

During the period, 1971–2015, around 8.77 million Pakistanis proceeded abroad for employment through the Bureau of Emigration. The main concentration of overseas Pakistanis was in the Middle East (49 per cent), Europe (28.2 per cent) and the United States of America (16 per cent). Manpower export continues to show an upward trend from 0.622 million in 2013 to 0.752 million in 2014 and 0.946 million in 2015. However, around half of the migrant workers are illiterate and unskilled workers and only 1.76 per cent workers are doing white-collar jobs. Among the skilled workers, drivers are in the highest number, followed by masons, carpenters and tailors.12

Many Pakistanis seem to talk about the ‘extinction-level birth rates’ of many Indian states in this forum. However, they fundamentally misunderstand the nature of the demographic dividend. The demographic dividend only arises as a result of decline in birth rates which allows for the population to be able to afford higher impact consumption goods like a better car, air conditioning, etc which simulate the local economy. Pakistan hasn’t even gotten started with its demographic dividend as its birth rates remain sky high meaning most of its population will be unable to afford the rates of consumption necessary to stimulate the economy. It is likely that Pakistan won’t enter its demographic dividend until 2050 alongside most of Africa. India itself has only entered the demographic dividend after 2013.13

The other problem with an unrealized demographic dividend is that an unproductive population would pose huge pressures on resources like food, water and energy. A country that was near to being self-sufficient in food in the early 1980s has a food security issue today largely due to increased population. As noted earlier, agriculture accounts for about 20 per cent of Pakistan’s GDP and employs 60 per cent of its labour while 70 per cent of export revenue stems from agriculture. A decline in water availability would impact on food production at a time when the population is increasing, creating multiple crises. And the availability of water is declining and is below the 1,000 m³ /year per capita benchmark.

Conclusion:

Pakistan: Courting the Abyss remains a great read to gain some amount of background on the various elements of the multi-crisis Pakistan finds itself in. Most of the issues detailed in the book have either exacerbated or maintain their significance. The only issue with the book is that it is rather lengthy and goes into excessive detail regarding each topic which may be too much for many casual readers. Even I had to plumb through the depths of many articles to fairly evaluate this book according to present sources.

TL;DR If you wish to understand the basic history, ideology, economy, water management, education, foreign policy, and future of Pakistan in a single book then this is the book for you.

P.S. Thanks for reading the article. If you’ve had the chance to read all my commentary on this book please recommend me some other books on similar topics. I would welcome any opposing perspectives on the matter.

Sources:

[1] Shuja Nawaz, Crossed Swords: Pakistan, Its Army, and the Wars Within, Karachi: OUP, 2008, pp. 570–71.

[2] Pervez Hoodbhoy, ‘Healing our sectarian divide’, Dawn, 21 February 2015.

[3] Nisar Ali, ‘Sympathisers, Supporters of Terrorists Live Among Us’, Dawn, 21 December 2014.

[4] ‘Madressah project: From reform to a registration drive’, Dawn, 29 December 2015.

[5] ‘Report says over 35,000 madrassas operating in Pakistan’, Pakistan Today, 31 July 2015.

[6] Cited in Hasan Mansoor, ‘Report on state of madressahs in Pakistan launched’, Dawn, 31 July 2015.

[7] Cited in Umar Cheema, ‘Not military but police-agencies cooperation needed to fix terrorists’, The News, 10 January 2015.

[8] Kaiser Bengali, ‘Water Management under Constraints: The Need for a Paradigm Shift’, in Michael Kugelman and Robert M. Hathaway (eds), op. cit., p. 48.

[9] FAO, AQUASTAT database, 2013, cited in Daanish Mustafa, Majed Akhter, and Natalie Nasrallah (eds), op. cit, p. 6.

[10] ‘Education crisis’, editorial, , 19 December 2015.

[11] Kaiser Bengali, ‘Proposed Agenda for Sustained Economic Revival’, Karachi: Social Policy and Development Centre, September 2013.

[12] Economic Survey 2015–16. Ministry of Finance, Government of Pakistan.

[13]Steven Brakman & Tristan Kohl & Charles van Marrewijk, 2024. “Demography and Income in the 21st Century: A Long-Run Perspective,” CESifo Working Paper Series 11108, CESifo.