Atlantic Council

Alexander the Great named the greatest river he had ever come across-- the Indus (sea). The land beyond the river came to be known after the river as India, and its inhabitants took on the label Hindu, a derivative of the local name of the river, Sindhu. The fact that a country and now a religion are named after this river is some indication of its cultural, spiritual, and not the least material significance to the people and civilizations living on its vast and fertile flood plains.

Agriculture constitutes 23% of the GDP of Pakistan and employs more than 44% of the labor force. The agriculture benefits from the largest contiguous surface irrigation system in the world. Of the 144 million acre feet (MAF) of water that on average enters the Indus basin, about 106 MAF is diverted to irrigate 40 million acres of cropland. The diversion and storage infrastructure is complemented by extensive levees that ensure that Indus basin rivers stick to the courses that are convenient for humans and allow occupancy of low lying flood plains. Such is the human impact in the basin that the hydrology of the Indus has been described by Jim Wescoat of MIT as "more cultural than natural."

It is the cultural hydrology of the Indus, coupled with increasingly frequent unusual monsoonal activity, that lies at the heart of the catastrophic flooding that we are seeing in the Indus and its tributaries. Indus rivers have some of the highest silt loads in the world because they drain one of the youngest mountain ranges in the world-- the Western Himalayas. The extensive diversion and storage of water means that the Indus rivers do not have enough flow to carry the silt, which gets deposited in the channels, thereby reducing the channel capacity to carry even minor floods. The river engineering has created a situation where an otherwise moderate flood flow can become a high flood and eventually a catastrophic flood.

So what is the long-term solution? Attempting to eliminate flooding is neither possible nor desirable. Floods deposit fertile alluvium that revitalizes the exhausted soils of the flood plain, from which much is asked by growing populations and even more rapacious global consumers of agricultural products. Failure is guaranteed if one approaches the Indus basin rivers with the intention of controlling or taming them. The only way forward is to adapt the rivers' hyrdological rhythms so as to maximize human benefits and minimize hazards. Such a strategic approach will entail reverting some-- definitely not all-- of the flood plain to the river, restoring wetlands to absorb flood pulses, and reforesting upstream catchment areas, along with making flood mitigation a higher priority in systems management protocols and improving flood warning systems.

On the institutional side, the Government of Pakistan (GoP) has received-- as usual-- considerable criticism for its slow response to the disaster. The GoP merits criticism on man acounts, but in the context of flood response much of the domestic and international attention is unfair. First, the extent of the disaster is such that any government in the world could not have fulfilled the type of retrospective expectation that the press and the public seems to have attached to the GoP's response. Second, all over the world the local level is the first and most appropriate level for responding to environmental disasters, not the national government. Third, disaster response in Pakistan is constitutinoally a provincial subject, not a federal subject. The federal government can offer assistance if requested by the provincial government, and even then the only institution it can offer is the armed forces. So the criticism that the military is doing everything and the federal government is not is incomprehensible. Fourth ,the provinces in Pakistan are so huge that the functionality of a federalist structure to ensure more efficient devolved government does not hold. Consider that Punjab province alone, with a population of more than 100 million, could be one of the 15 most populous countries in the world. In the absence of representative local government structures, which the present provinces themselves undermined and then eliminated, the provincial governments' reponses were also inevitably inadequate.

The challenges for Pakistan in the aftermath of the flood will involve considerable financial resources-- which is the easy part. Long-term solutions to prevent the repeat of present crises will be constrained more by limited imagination than by resources. It is there that the Pakistani water managers could complement their technological prowess with insights from their own people's adaptation to floods. It is also there that the Pakistani and international scholars and practitioners from multiple disciplinary backgrounds could undertake cross-fertilization of ideas for the more equitable, productive, and ecologically friendly management of the Indus basin.

Dr. Daanish Mustafa is a Senior Lecturer in Environment, Politics, and Development in the Department of Geography at King's College, London. He is currently collaborating with the South Asia Center to address water issues in the region. Photo credit: AP Photo. Dr. Mustafa recently discussed this topic with the BBC World Service.