Pakistan has found a new way to avoid discussing terrorism.
This time the subject is water.
On June 18, a conference in Brussels titled “Transboundary Water Resources: A Weaponised Global Common” assembled Pakistani politicians, diplomats, activists and sympathetic interlocutors to discuss the Indus Waters Treaty (IWT).
According to accounts of the event, there was no Indian representation. Yet participants had no difficulty reaching a predetermined conclusion: India is weaponising water, violating international norms and threatening millions of Pakistanis.
The timing was not accidental. Pakistan is struggling to shape the international narrative after India placed the Indus Waters Treaty in abeyance following the April 2025 Pahalgam terror attack, in which 26 civilians were murdered by Pakistan-sponsored terrorists.
Faced with renewed scrutiny over terrorism, Islamabad has done what it has done for decades: change the subject. Instead of discussing why India acted, Pakistan wants the world discussing rivers.
The message was simple. Pakistan is the victim. India is the aggressor. Europe should be concerned. What was conspicuously absent was the reason the treaty was put in abeyance in the first place.
The argument advanced by Pakistani officials rests on a convenient assumption that the Indus Waters Treaty exists in isolation from the wider relationship between the two countries.
Terror attacks may occur. Civilians may be killed. Cross-border militancy may continue. Yet India, according to this logic, must continue treating the treaty as untouchable regardless of circumstances.
But no sovereign state operates that way.
For more than six decades, India honoured the treaty through wars, military crises, terrorist attacks and prolonged hostility. Few countries would have shown similar restraint.
Indeed, many Indian water experts have long argued that the treaty was one of the most accommodating water-sharing arrangements ever accepted by an upper-riparian state.
While India is the upstream country, the agreement allocated the overwhelming share of Indus basin waters to Pakistan and imposed significant restrictions on India’s use of the western rivers.
That debate is not new. What is new is Pakistan’s attempt to portray any questioning of the treaty as an assault on international law and human survival.
Speaking to StratNewsGlobal, former Bhakra Beas Management Board Chairman Devendra Sharma argued that the treaty imposed substantial developmental and economic costs on India while providing Pakistan repeated opportunities to obstruct Indian projects through legal challenges and arbitration proceedings.
According to Sharma, Pakistan routinely used treaty mechanisms to delay hydroelectric projects, increase costs and restrict India’s ability to manage river systems effectively. The result was years of lost opportunities, particularly in Jammu and Kashmir.
This is the part of the story Pakistan prefers not to discuss.
For decades, successive governments in Jammu and Kashmir complained that the treaty limited irrigation, delayed infrastructure projects and prevented the full utilisation of the region’s hydropower potential. Proposed projects became trapped in disputes and arbitration processes. Economic benefits that should have accrued to local communities remained unrealised.
The costs were not confined to Jammu and Kashmir.
India faces growing water stress across Punjab, Haryana and Rajasthan. Groundwater depletion has reached alarming levels in many districts. Yet even as domestic pressures intensified, India remained bound by restrictions negotiated under very different circumstances six decades ago.
None of this means India intends to deprive Pakistan of water, an accusation has become a central plank of Pakistan’s international campaign. It is also one of its weakest arguments.
Sharma has pointed out that India already possesses substantial storage capacity on the eastern rivers and has never attempted to use water flows as a weapon. In fact, Indian infrastructure has often moderated flood conditions downstream.
The image of India suddenly opening dams to punish Pakistan makes for dramatic conference speeches bears little resemblance to reality. What matters here is not hydrology but politics.
Pakistan understands that arguing about terrorism is difficult. Arguing about water is easier.
Water allows Islamabad to frame itself as a vulnerable victim rather than a state repeatedly accused of supporting cross-border militancy. It allows discussions to shift from security to climate change, from terrorism to humanitarian concerns, from accountability to emotion.
That strategy was on display in Brussels.
A conference featuring no Indian voices but extensive criticism of India was unlikely to produce a balanced discussion. Instead, it served as another platform for Pakistan’s preferred narrative: every crisis in the relationship is India’s fault and every Pakistani grievance deserves international intervention.
For years, Pakistan insisted that India respect the sanctity of the Indus Waters Treaty regardless of developments elsewhere. Yet the same principle rarely appeared to apply when terrorism repeatedly poisoned the broader relationship. India was expected to separate water from security while Pakistan treated security concerns as somebody else’s problem.
That contradiction has finally caught up with Islamabad.
The Kutniti Foundation has argued that water diplomacy cannot be divorced from the strategic environment in which it operates. That observation should be self-evident. Treaties do not exist in a vacuum. They survive because the political conditions sustaining them survive.
Pakistan would like Europe to believe that the current dispute is about water alone. It is not.
The treaty was not placed in abeyance because of rainfall, reservoirs or river engineering. It was placed in abeyance because a country cannot endlessly absorb terrorism while pretending nothing else has changed.
Brussels may applaud Pakistan’s rhetoric. Think tanks may host sympathetic panels. Diplomats may issue statements about humanitarian concerns. But none of that alters the central fact.
The crisis surrounding the Indus Waters Treaty did not begin with water. It began with terrorism.
And until Pakistan confronts that reality, every conference, seminar and lobbying campaign will look less like diplomacy and more like an attempt to wash away responsibility downstream.
Guests reportedly left the Brussels gathering after enjoying an assortment of Pakistani delicacies. Fair enough. Every host is entitled to put its best offerings on the table.
The problem is that one crucial ingredient was missing from the menu: an honest discussion about the terrorism that brought the Indus Waters Treaty to this point in the first place.
