The Fire and the Flood: How Pakistan Won the Air War But Is Losing the Water War in Punjab

The Fire and the Flood: Two Wars, One Nation

On May 10, 2025, a ceasefire ended eighty-seven hours of aerial combat between India and Pakistan. The skies over Kashmir and Punjab, once filled with fighter jets and missiles, became quiet. Pakistan declared victory, while India withdrew to its side of the Line of Control. The Pakistan Air Force (PAF) shot down eight Indian aircraft, including four French-made Rafale jets, which are India’s most advanced fighters. Pakistani pilots were celebrated as national heroes, and media coverage showed images of wreckage, pilots, and flag-waving crowds. For several days, Pakistan experienced a sense of national unity and triumph.

However, two hundred miles south of the air bases, in the fields of central Punjab, a different crisis was unfolding, one in which Pakistan was not prevailing. This conflict did not involve fighter jets or ceasefires. Instead, it centered on the aquifer beneath the region’s intensive irrigation system. Solar-powered tube wells were extracting groundwater at unsustainable rates. The affected individuals were not soldiers, but farmers, landless laborers, women, and children, the very people the air war aimed to protect.

This essay contends that these two conflicts, the aerial and the environmental, are interconnected. Both reflect a struggle for survival shaped by a Pakistani state that has prioritized military spending over water security, geopolitical interests over ecological planning, and the interests of large landowners over those of small farmers. While Pakistan achieved a significant victory in the air, it is losing the water crisis not solely due to India’s blockade but also because of domestic political and economic choices. The challenge lies not only across the border, but also within a ruling class that views the aquifer as an unlimited resource rather than a shared responsibility.

This situation is a political crisis presented as a climate issue. Like other political challenges, it can be addressed, but only if it is recognized and understood.

The Geopolitics of Thirst: India’s Seventy-Year Siege

To understand the water crisis, we must begin not in 2025 but in 1960, when the Indus Waters Treaty was signed. Brokered by the World Bank, the treaty divided the six rivers of the Indus basin between India and Pakistan. India received the three eastern rivers: the Ravi, Beas, and Sutlej. Pakistan received the three western rivers: the Indus, Jhelum, and Chenab. The arrangement was never fair. It left Pakistan, the downstream nation, dependent on India’s goodwill for the flow of water that irrigated 80 percent of its agricultural land. For six decades, the treaty held, barely.

India, however, never accepted the spirit of the treaty. From the 1970s onward, it built dams, barrages, and diversions on its eastern rivers, reducing the flow into Pakistan. The Shahpur Kandi barrage on the Ravi, first conceived in the 1970s and completed in phases, was finished in February 2024. According to Pakistan’s Commissioner for Indus Waters, the flow of the Ravi into Pakistan dropped by more than 90 percent over two decades. What once watered millions of acres in Pakistani Punjab now irrigates fields in Indian districts of Kathua and Samba.

This pattern showed that India was leveraging water resources before the formal suspension of the treaty. The suspension itself, however, was unexpected.

On April 22, 2025, a terrorist attack in Pahalgam, Indian-administered Kashmir, killed twenty-six tourists. Within forty-eight hours, India announced the formal suspension of the Indus Waters Treaty, an act with no legal basis under the treaty’s dispute-resolution mechanisms. Within days, India shut down the Baglihar and Salal dams on the Chenab River, a western river over which India has only limited rights. At the Marala headworks in Pakistani Punjab, the gateway through which Chenab water enters Pakistan’s canal system, water levels plummeted from 87,000 cusecs to 4,300 cusecs in just two days. By December 2025, the Chenab at Marala had dropped to 870 cusecs—less than one-tenth of the ten-year average.

Pakistani officials called the situation “water terrorism.” While this term highlights the severity of the action, the effectiveness of India’s water blockade was due not only to its upstream position but also to Pakistan’s lack of a strategic response. Pakistan’s surface water storage capacity covers only 30 days of demand, compared to India’s 120 days and Egypt’s 1,000 days. The canal system loses an estimated 40 percent of its water to seepage and evaporation, and groundwater governance was largely absent.

The blockade revealed vulnerabilities that had developed over decades. This was not a natural disaster, but rather a result of political shortcomings presented as an act of war.

The Fire in the Sky: How Pakistan Won the Air War

While the water blockade strangled Punjab’s fields, India launched a parallel military assault. On May 6, 2025, India initiated Operation Sindoor, striking what it called “terrorist infrastructure” in six Pakistani cities with approximately eighty aircraft. It was the largest Indian air operation since the 1971 war. Pakistan responded within hours with Operation Marka-e-Haq (The Battle for Truth). What followed was eighty-seven hours of intense, multi-domain aerial combat over the skies of Kashmir and Punjab.

The Pakistan Air Force’s performance was nothing short of extraordinary. Using a combination of F-16s, JF-17 Thunders, and Mirage III/5 aircraft, the PAF outmaneuvered and destroyed Indian fighter jets in beyond-visual-range engagements. By the time the ceasefire was signed on May 10, the PAF had shot down eight Indian aircraft, including four French-made Rafale jets—India’s most advanced and expensive assets. The Rafale, which India purchased for $2.4 billion to acquire 36 aircraft, was supposed to be invincible. The PAF proved otherwise.

A French intelligence official, speaking anonymously to CNN, confirmed that Pakistan had downed at least one Rafale. Pakistani defense officials released photographs of wreckage bearing French manufacturer labels. The Indian Air Force, desperate to hide the scale of its losses, initially claimed it had shot down thirteen Pakistani aircraft—a figure that independent analysts quickly debunked. Satellite imagery showed no corresponding wreckage on the Pakistani side. The PAF also destroyed an Indian MiG-29, a Sukhoi-30MKI, and a drone. Indian airbases in Pathankot, Adampur, and Srinagar were hit by Pakistani retaliatory strikes.

But the most significant achievement was defensive: the PAF successfully protected Pakistani airspace. Not a single major Pakistani military installation was destroyed. Not a single Pakistani city was bombed. India’s Operation Sindoor failed to achieve any of its strategic objectives. By May 9, the Indian Air Force was exhausted. Its loss rate was unsustainable. Its morale was shattered. On May 10, India quietly agreed to a US-brokered ceasefire.

Officially, both sides claimed victory. But the battlefield told a different story. The PAF had humiliated a much larger, better-funded air force. Pakistani pilots became national heroes. The Indian Air Force faced public scrutiny and military inquiries. For a few days, Pakistan was united in a way it had not been since the 1971 war—not in defeat, but in triumph.

But here is the question that no one asked during the victory celebrations: What, exactly, had been won? The air war had stopped India’s bombing campaign. It had restored Pakistan’s honor. It had demonstrated the PAF’s exceptional skill. But it had not restored the flow of the Chenab. It had not replenished the aquifer. It had not given drinking water to the 27,000 children who die every year in Punjab from diarrheal diseases caused by contaminated water. The air war was a victory. But it was a hollow one, because the water war continued, and Pakistan was losing it.

The Solar Trap: How Green Technology Became an Instrument of Ecological Suicide

With the Chenab’s flow reduced to a trickle, farmers across Punjab faced an impossible choice: watch their crops die, or find another source of water. They chose the only alternative available: groundwater, pumped through tube wells. And to power those pumps, they turned to solar energy. The logic was impeccable: free energy from the sun, no more diesel bills, no more dependence on an unreliable grid. The Punjab government enthusiastically promoted this transition, launching a CM Solarization Program for Agri Tubewells with a budget of nearly 10 billion rupees. By 2025, some 650,000 solar-powered tube wells dotted the landscape of Pakistani Punjab.

From the perspective of climate mitigation, this looked like a success story. Renewable energy is replacing fossil fuels. Reduced carbon emissions. Energy independence for small farmers. The World Bank and Asian Development Bank praised the initiative as a model for climate adaptation in the Global South. But from the perspective of groundwater hydrology, the solar revolution was a slow-motion ecological catastrophe.

The basic physics is simple: groundwater is a finite resource. Under natural conditions, aquifers are recharged by rainfall and river seepage at a rate determined by geology and climate. In Punjab, the recharge rate is approximately 35 million acre-feet per year. But the extraction rate is now 60 million acre-feet—or more. That 60 million acre-feet figure, published by the Punjab Irrigation Department, may be a significant underestimate; other studies place annual extraction as high as 67 million acre-feet. What is indisputable is that the extraction rate is 142 percent higher than the recharge rate.

Farmers with solar panels no longer ration their pumping. They no longer wait for cheap nighttime electricity tariffs or calculate the cost of diesel against the price of their crop. With solar, the marginal cost of pumping is essentially zero. So, they pump more. They pump longer. They pump deeper. And they pump without restraint.

The consequence has been a precipitous decline in the water table. In central Punjab, the water table is falling by five to nine feet annually. The area where the water table has dropped below sixty feet, a level designated as critical by Punjab’s irrigation department, expanded by 25 percent between 2020 and 2024, now covering 6.6 percent of the province. In the deepest pockets, where water lies beyond eighty feet, the area more than doubled during the same period.

This is the tragedy of the commons in its most acute form—what the Marxist ecologist John Bellamy Foster has called the “metabolic rift,” the rupture in the sustainable exchange between human societies and the natural world under capitalism. Each farmer acts rationally in his own interest, but the sum of those rational actions is collective ruin. The state has done nothing to prevent this. There is no licensing system for tube wells in Pakistan. No metering of extraction. No progressive tariff on water use. The Punjab Water Act of 2019 and the Punjab Irrigation, Drainage and Rivers Act of 2023 exist on paper. On the ground, they are dead letters.

The solar pump, hailed as a technological fix, has become a drill bit boring into the foundation of rural society. And this tragedy was accelerated by India’s water blockade. The blockade forced farmers who might have waited, who might have conserved, to pump now, to pump desperately, to pump as if there were no tomorrow. Because for them, tomorrow might not come.

Who Loses First? Class, Gender, and the Unequal Distribution of Ecological Ruin

The collapse of Punjab’s aquifer is not an equal-opportunity disaster. Class cuts through the water crisis like a blade through a dry field.

The large landowner with twenty-five acres can afford a 20-horsepower solar system and the 400-foot borehole needed to reach the falling water table. He can also afford to keep pumping even as his neighbors’ wells run dry. The small farmer with five acres can barely afford a smaller solar pump, but he must watch helplessly as his own borehole needs to be deepened year after year, each deepening consuming a larger share of his income. According to a 2025 report, small farmers in Toba Tek Singh and Jhang, where water tables have dropped by seven and eight feet respectively, now spend between 25 and 40 percent of their annual income simply on accessing water.

The tenant farmer the hari who cultivates land owned by someone else has not well of his own. He depends entirely on the landowner’s pump, paying for water either in cash or in a larger share of the harvest. As water becomes scarcer, the terms of exchange become more exploitative. The landless laborer, the mazdoor who works for daily wages is even more exposed. When water disappears, so do the crops. When the crops disappear, so does the work. When the work disappears, so does the food.

And then there are the women. In the villages of southern Punjab, where the water table has fallen below the reach of community hand pumps, the task of fetching water has fallen entirely on women and girls. The Pakistan Council of Research in Water Resources (PCRWR) estimates that 80 percent of the population in rural Punjab now has access to unsafe or insufficient drinking water, and that nearly 27,000 children under five die from diarrheal diseases annually as a result of contaminated water. As the falling water table draws up naturally occurring arsenic and fluoride from deeper geological layers, the health crisis worsens. In Muzaffargarh, 60 percent of children show signs of arsenic poisoning.

The hidden cost of the water crisis is the education of girls, who are pulled out of school to fetch water. The hidden cost is the chronic back pain and pelvic inflammatory disease that comes from carrying 40-pound water containers for hours each day. The hidden cost is the death of children from preventable diseases. These are not externalities; they are the human face of the crisis, borne disproportionately by those with the least power to change it.

The water crisis in Punjab is therefore not one crisis but several, layered on top of each other like sedimentary rock. The top layer is the geopolitical crisis—India’s treaty suspension, its dam closures, and its reallocation of water to its own territories. The middle layer is the governance crisis Pakistan’s failure to regulate groundwater extraction, its promotion of solar pumping without aquifer management, its corruption and incompetence. The bottom layer the foundation on which everything else rests is the class crisis. A society in which water is treated as a commodity to be extracted by those who can afford the pumps, rather than as a common resource to be shared equitably among all, will inevitably produce the outcomes we are seeing in Punjab.

The Unlearned Lesson: Why Military Victory Is Not the Same as Security

The May 2025 air war taught Pakistan a brutal lesson: India cannot be trusted. But the water crisis teaches an even more brutal lesson: Pakistan cannot trust itself. The country’s military establishment has spent seven decades preparing to fight India, building fighter jets, training pilots, and acquiring nuclear weapons. It has spent almost nothing on preparing for the water crisis. The defense budget consumes an estimated 20 percent of the federal budget, while water infrastructure receives less than 2 percent. The disparity is obscene, and it is lethal.

Consider the numbers. Pakistan’s surface water storage capacity is sufficient for only 30 days of demand. India’s is 120 days. Egypt’s is 1,000 days. Pakistan has not built a major new dam since the 1970s, despite decades of feasibility studies and international offers of financing. The Kalabagh Dam, proposed in the 1980s, remains unbuilt due to political opposition, opposition that the military, which has ruled Pakistan for half its history, has never been able to overcome. Meanwhile, the same military has spent billions on fighter jets, missiles, and nuclear warheads.

The water crisis is not a failure of technology. It is a failure of political will. The military’s obsession with the eastern border has blinded it to the slower, quieter, but equally existential threat beneath its feet. A country that cannot feed its people or provide them with clean water is fundamentally vulnerable, regardless of the size of its army or the skill of its pilots. The generals focus on the imagined enemy across the border. The real enemy, thirst, hunger, and ecological collapse has been winning inside Pakistan for decades.

This is the unlearned lesson of Pakistan’s military history. After the 1965 war, which ended in a stalemate, Pakistan celebrated its “victory” while India quietly built dams. After the 1971 war, which ended in Pakistan’s dismemberment, the military doubled down on its eastern focus. After the Kargil War of 1999, which was a clear defeat, the military learned nothing about the importance of water security. And after the May 2025 air war, which was a genuine victory, the same pattern threatens to repeat: parades and medals, while the aquifer falls another foot.

The water blockade is not a problem of Indian aggression alone. It is a problem of Pakistani political failure. India is merely exploiting a vulnerability that Pakistan has done nothing to address. The state has armed its farmers with solar pumps to win a battle against dry fields, but it is losing the war for the survival of the Indus Basin.

What Is to Be Done? Building Water Sovereignty through Collective Action

The liberal reformist answer to this crisis is more regulation. License the tube wells. Meter the extraction. Charge progressive tariffs. Invest in aquifer recharge. Diversify crops away from rice and sugarcane toward millet and pulses. These are necessary measures, but they are not sufficient. They are not sufficient because they do not address the underlying political economy of water in Punjab.

The real answer, the only answer that can work over the long term, is collective ownership and democratic management of groundwater. Not privatization, which would hand the aquifer to the largest landowners and agribusiness corporations. Not statist control, which would hand it to the same corrupt bureaucracy that has already failed to enforce existing water laws. But common ownership by the water users themselves, the farmers, the tenants, the landless laborers, the women who fetch the water organized into water user associations with real authority to set extraction limits, enforce them, and reinvest the proceeds in aquifer recharge and community development.

This is not a utopian fantasy. Similar systems exist in parts of India, Mexico, Chile, and the American Southwest. They are difficult to establish, and they require both state support and grassroots organizing. But they are the only alternative to the current trajectory, which ends with Punjab’s aquifers drained beyond recovery, and Punjab’s agricultural society collapsed into dust.

Consider the case of the Andean communities of Peru, where indigenous peasant federations have established community-controlled water systems that prioritize human needs over commercial extraction. Or consider the acequia associations of northern New Mexico, where community-managed irrigation ditches have sustained small-scale agriculture for centuries. In each case, the key is not technology or regulation but power: the power of water users to make decisions collectively, to exclude those who violate community norms, and to invest in the long-term health of the watershed.

Such a transformation would require a radical redistribution of power in rural Punjab—something the existing ruling class is unlikely to support. But the alternative is equally radical: the slow death of Punjab’s agricultural economy, the displacement of millions of farmers and laborers, and the transformation of one of South Asia’s most productive regions into a water-scarce wasteland. The choice is not between collective management and the status quo; the choice is between collective management and collective suicide. There is no third option.

Pakistan must also break the military’s stranglehold on national priorities. For seventy-five years, the army has consumed a disproportionate share of the national budget, leaving water infrastructure, education, and health underfunded. The 2025 war proved that no number of fighter jets can protect a country that cannot feed itself. The real defense of Pakistan lies not in Rafale-killers, but in aquifers, canals, and dams. The generals must learn this lesson or be forced to by a population that will no longer accept their priorities.

Victory Without Water Is Hollow

Pakistan achieved a decisive victory in the air war, with the PAF demonstrating exceptional performance and uniting the nation in pride. However, this success is overshadowed by ongoing water scarcity. Farmers in Punjab continue to rely on groundwater, women still walk long distances for drinking water, and children remain at risk from arsenic poisoning. Military achievements cannot address these fundamental challenges. Pakistan’s leadership, both civilian and military, must confront this reality.

India’s water blockade failed. Its air force was humiliated. Its attempt to break Pakistan’s will backfired. By any reasonable military measure, Pakistan won the May 2025 conflict. But winning the battle is not the same as winning the war. The war for water is far from over. India will try again. It will build more dams, divert more rivers, and weaponize water again. That is the nature of imperialism. But Pakistan now has a choice: it can continue to rely on its pilots and its jets, and they performed heroically, or it can finally build the water infrastructure, groundwater regulation, and social solidarity that will make it truly resilient. The first path leads to short-term glory and long-term ruin. The second path leads to genuine sovereignty.

The farmers of Punjab know which path they need to take. The question is whether the generals, the politicians, and the landlords will let them take it.

References

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“Depleting groundwater,” Dawn, February 6, 2025.
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