Between Threats and Truces: The Narrative War Behi…

This 14th of August, as the green and white flags go up from Karachi to Khyber and the air fills with the crackle of fireworks, there is a question every young Pakistani must ask themselves: what exactly are we celebrating? Is it merely the fact that a nation was born at the stroke of midnight 79 years ago? Or is it something far more demanding — the unfinished promise of that birth, the dream that millions carried across blood-soaked borders, the conviction that Pakistan would be not just a homeland, but a beacon? Nisid Hajari’s book Midnight’s Furies does not let us off easy. It drags us back to the raw, unvarnished truth of 1947 — and in doing so, it hands our generation something precious: the tools to understand who we are, where we came from, and what we still owe to those who paid the ultimate price for our freedom. Hajari wrote that on 9 August 1947, a train pulls out of Delhi bound for Karachi, 800 miles away. Onboard are Muslim clerks and officials who had served the British-run government of India with distinction. With them are their families, their ribbon-tied files, their children’s toys, their prayer rugs, and the gold jewellery that represented their life’s savings. They are not refugees fleeing in panic. They are pioneers, volunteers for a great experiment — the world’s first modern Muslim nation. As the train whistles out of Delhi, cheers of “Pakistan Zindabad!” drown out the engine. These men and women believe they are building something unprecedented. Something magnificent. They never arrive. Sikh saboteurs — soldiers in all but name, their tiny community having supplied the Indian Army with fighting men far beyond their numbers — have laid gelignite charges along the tracks. The mine detonates. The Pakistan Special shudders. And in that moment, the euphoria of independence meets the savagery of Partition. Hajari, who spent over a year buried in archives across New Delhi, London, and Washington, D.C., reconstructs this tragedy not from myth but from the “demi-official record” — the diaries, army sitreps, embassy cables, and informant reports that tell the real story. And the real story is this: Pakistan was born not in a garden of roses, but in a furnace. The arithmetic of that furnace defies comprehension. One British official, working from casualty reports, put the dead at 200,000. Others, accounting for disease, starvation, and exposure, insist the figure exceeds one million. At least 14 million people were uprooted — the largest forced migration in human history. Western Pakistan was virtually emptied of Hindus and Sikhs; Indian Punjab lost almost all its Muslims. This was carnage on a scale unseen until Rwanda 1994. Yet here is what Hajari forces us to confront: the killing lasted only six weeks. The violence was contained. What was not contained — what metastasised — was the psychological wound. In those weeks, something broke between India and Pakistan that has never been repaired. Leaders on both sides began suspecting each other of complicity in genocide. Mutual mistrust pushed infant nations to war within a year. And Pakistan, flooded with refugees, its economy and bureaucracy teetering on collapse, developed what Hajari calls a ‘deep-seated paranoia’ about its larger neighbour that shapes our politics to this very day. Hajari’s book is unsparing about the failures of leadership that turned Partition’s trauma into perpetual conflict. Nehru and Jinnah — the very architects of freedom — allowed vanity, prejudice, and petty dislike to poison the well. Nehru’s reckless declaration in August 1946 that a strong government would make the Muslim League’s movement “go down” — what Viceroy Wavell called tossing “a match onto dangerously dry kindling” — helped trigger the Great Calcutta Killing, the dress rehearsal for Partition’s horrors. Five thousand dead. Ten to fifteen thousand maimed. The Statesman newspaper, grasping for words, called it “a fury” — a word from mediaeval history. This Independence Day, let us do something radical. Let us honour the dead not by reliving their fears, but by fulfilling their hopes. Jinnah’s address to the Constituent Assembly on 11 August 1947 was crystal clear: ‘You are free; you are free to go to your temples, you are free to go to your mosques or to any other place of worship in this State of Pakistan.’ He envisioned a secular nation where religion was private, not political. Where Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, and Christians would be equal before the law. Where the state would be a servant of all its citizens, not a weapon of the majority. Hajari’s book ends on a note of hard-won wisdom: ‘Only once those mistakes are properly understood and acknowledged, perhaps, will India and Pakistan begin to bridge the vast and dangerous gulf that still divides them.’ Understanding does not mean surrender. Acknowledgement does not mean apology. It means maturity. It means the confidence to say: we know our history, we honour our sacrifices, and we refuse to let the furies of 1947 dictate our future. So when the flag goes up this 14th August, let it mean something new. Let it mean that Pakistan is done being defined by what it fears. Let it mean that we are ready to be defined by what we build — by our universities and our hospitals, our clean rivers and our fair courts, our poets and our scientists, our daughters who dream without limits and our sons who know that strength comes from justice, not just arms.

Connecting Gilgit-Baltistan (GB) to the National Grid—and guaranteeing a dedicated clean hydro quota—is not merely an infrastructural goal; it is an ecological imperative and the definitive key to realizing the region’s full potential. High in the Karakoram and Himalayan ranges, where soaring glaciers feed the roaring Indus River, sits Gilgit-Baltistan—a land defined by its breathtaking landscapes, strategic geopolitical footprint, and an excruciating policy failure. Though this high-mountain region acts as the primary water tower of Pakistan, generating the very lifeblood that sustains the nation’s agricultural heartland and downstream hydroelectric dams, its own citizens spend their lives in perpetual darkness. For nearly eight decades since independence, the people of Gilgit-Baltistan have endured a chronic, soul-crushing energy crisis. In the harsh high-altitude winters, when temperatures plunge far below freezing and regional run-of-the-river hydel plants freeze solid or lose flow, power outages stretch to an agonizing twenty-two hours a day. Entire cities like Skardu and Gilgit grind to an absolute halt. Modern medical facilities run on expensive, precarious diesel generators, students study by the dim flicker of kerosene lamps, and families are forced to strip fragile mountain ecosystems of firewood simply to survive the winter. This domestic isolation becomes outright tragic when set against the backdrop of broader South Asian regional integration. Today, cross-border grid interconnections are becoming standard practice across the subcontinent. India has built high-voltage transmission lines linking its power architecture with Bhutan, Nepal, Bangladesh, and Myanmar, while making major technical strides to link Sri Lanka across the Palk Strait. Under frameworks like the “One Sun, One World, One Grid” initiative, neighboring nations seamlessly buy, sell, and route cross-border electricity to balance seasonal surpluses and deficits. Bhutan finances its national development by wheeling clean hydro power directly into the Indian market. Nepal trades its monsoon hydro surpluses across borders to avoid spilling water, pulling power back when river flows decline. Even nations separated by deep political, geographic, and sovereign boundaries manage to run copper and steel across international borders so their citizens do not sit in the dark. Yet, after 79 years of shared history, Pakistan presents an embarrassing anomaly. The state has built a national power grid that spans thousands of miles from the Arabian Sea to Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, and downcountry Pakistan often wrestles with systemic generation capacity surpluses, yet it has failed to link its own sovereign territory of Gilgit-Baltistan to the National Grid. Gilgit-Baltistan remains an island—an off-grid enclave stranded inside its own country, cut off from the main transmission backbone. While foreign nations in South Asia trade thousands of megawatts in real time across sovereign borders, Pakistan’s own northern frontier cannot draw a single kilowatt from the national thermal and solar reserves down south during the freezing winter months. This policy neglect is even more absurd considering that mere miles from where local populations freeze, one of the greatest engineering feats in South Asian history is taking shape. The Diamer Basha Dam Project, currently under construction near Chilas on the River Indus, boasts an astounding installed generation capacity of 4,500 megawatts and an expected annual output of over eighteen billion units of clean, renewable energy. The dam will transform Pakistan’s national economy, but it raises a fundamental moral and legal question: will it transform the lives of the people living in its shadow, or will the power simply pass over their heads to serve distant urban centers while local towns remain dark? To correct a structural imbalance that has persisted since 1947, the Federal Government of Pakistan and the Water and Power Development Authority (WAPDA) must formally dedicate a guaranteed quota of 500 megawatts of power from the Diamer Basha Dam directly to Gilgit-Baltistan. This allocation is not an act of federal charity; it is a pragmatic, economically transformative, and ethically mandatory policy that aligns local resource rights with national progress. To understand why a 500-megawatt direct allocation is essential, one must look at the region’s fragile, isolated micro-hydel infrastructure. Historically, Gilgit-Baltistan has relied on small-scale localized plants built on seasonal mountain streams. While these plants function adequately during the summer melt, they are acutely vulnerable to climate shifts and freeze cycles. When winter arrives and glacial run-offs plummet, local power generation drops by over eighty percent. Because the region is not connected to the main transmission grid, it cannot import balancing power, leaving the local economy frozen. Despite possessing immense potential as an international hub for eco-tourism, organic agriculture, high-altitude software hubs, and gemstone processing, serious industrial investors routinely stay away due to acute energy insecurity. The cost of doing business is artificially inflated by reliance on imported fossil fuels, creating a cycle of underdevelopment that forces educated, talented youth to migrate to major cities downcountry in search of basic livelihoods. Allocating 500 megawatts out of Diamer Basha’s 4,500-megawatt capacity represents just eleven percent of the dam’s total output. For the national power sector, absorbing this slight allocation is negligible. For Gilgit-Baltistan, however, this capacity is transformative. It represents complete regional energy self-sufficiency, year-round grid stability, and surplus capacity to fuel industrial growth for generations. To execute this vision cleanly and equitably, a structured cost-sharing implementation model must be established between the federal center and the region. The federal government and WAPDA must formally ring-fence a 500-megawatt generation quota from the powerhouse specifically for the region at concessional local tariffs. In return, the regional government of Gilgit-Baltistan must take complete ownership of downstream execution. The regional government must build high-voltage transmission lines connecting the powerhouse at Chilas to major regional load centers like Gilgit, Skardu, Hunza, and Ghizer, while overhauling local grid stations and distribution lines. By dividing responsibility—federal generation matched by regional distribution—both parties build a long-overdue partnership rooted in shared accountability. An allocation of this scale does far more than illuminate living rooms; it fundamentally reshapes the socio-economic trajectory of the entire northern frontier. With a dependable baseload, Gilgit-Baltistan can transition from a subsistence economy to a value-added manufacturing and processing hub. Local mineral wealth—including high-grade marble, granite, and precious gemstones—can be processed

Dr Pervez Butt died on the 26th of July, 2026, at the age of 84, and with him Pakistan lost one of the last living architects of its nuclear age. The obituaries will rightly recount the long arc of his public service: joining the Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission in 1963, cutting his teeth on the design of KANUPP-I, Pakistan’s first commercial nuclear power plant, spending years at GE Canada absorbing the discipline of reactor engineering, and eventually rising to chair the PAEC from 2001 to 2006 — a tenure during which he oversaw the expansion of Chashma and laid groundwork that would carry Pakistan’s nuclear power programme well into this century. He would go on to serve as Federal Secretary for Science and Technology, as an adviser at the Planning Commission, and, until his final days, as a quiet counsel to the National Command Authority. Nishan-i-Imtiaz, Hilal-i-Imtiaz, Sitara-i-Imtiaz — the honours are a matter of record.     But I did not know him first as a chairman or a decorated public servant. I knew him as a teacher who happened to hold the keys to some of the country’s most consequential engineering decisions, and who chose, for reasons I am still grateful for, to hand a few of those keys to me. I want to remember him the way I actually experienced him — not through the official biography, but through three long afternoons at his house in F-11 Sector, Islamabad, where he taught me something the textbooks never quite manage: how the price of nuclear electricity in Pakistan is actually determined. Anyone who has sat through a lecture on tariff determination knows how dry the subject can be made to sound — EPC cost, fuel cost, capacity purchase price, energy purchase price, indexation, decommissioning liability. Dr. Butt made none of it dry. He made it a ritual. Each session began the same way, and the way it began told you everything about the man. There was no walking straight into the numbers. First came tea — always a full spread of dry fruits, delicate sandwiches, fresh fruit, chana chaat, and cappuccino. It was in his drawing room that I had my first Cortado, and my first Mocha, both poured by a man who clearly took as much pride in introducing a good cup of coffee as he did in explaining a heat-rate calculation. Only once the plates were cleared did the real class begin. He held nothing back. The sessions ran from ten in the morning until nearly four in the afternoon — six hours at a stretch, with no formal lunch break at all. Instead, somewhere past midday, a trolley would appear, loaded with Lahori chanay and naan, and he would keep teaching straight through it, tariff formulas in one breath and the economics of fuel fabrication cost in the next, a piece of naan in hand the whole time. I have sat in university seminars with more structure and far less learned. What I remember most, though, is the break. Every two hours, without fail, he would stop — not because he was tired, but because he knew I smoked, and he had built an orchard directly across the road from his house for exactly this purpose. We would walk over together, and his waiter would already be there ahead of us, a fresh cappuccino on the table, an ashtray set out with wet tissue paper folded neatly beside it — a small, deliberate touch that told you this man planned for his guests down to the last detail. And it was in that orchard, not at his desk, that the real teaching happened. He would ask me, plainly, to repeat back what I had just understood. Not to test me — to correct me, gently, if I had drifted, and to make sure the idea had actually landed before we walked back inside for the next round. I was, I suspect, an unlikely student for him to invest that kind of care in. I have never been a person drawn to nuclear energy for its own sake — the physics of it, the fission and the neutrons and the reactor cores, left me largely unmoved. What pulled me toward him was the economics: how a country decides what a unit of nuclear electricity should cost, how the capital recovery on a plant like K-2 or C-3 gets built into a tariff, how fuel cost and EPC cost and decommissioning liability all get stitched together into a number that regulators can defend and the public can pay. That was the language I wanted to learn, and he taught it to me the way he taught everything — thoroughly, patiently, and without ever once looking at the clock. Looking back, I think that was the most VIP treatment anyone taught by him could have asked for — not a title, not a certificate, but three full days of a man who had chaired the PAEC choosing to spend his mornings, his working lunches, and his smoking breaks making sure a subject I hadn’t cared about a week earlier had become one I could speak on with confidence. Pakistan will remember Dr. Pervez Butt for KANUPP and Chashma, for the plants he helped design and the institutions he helped build — the Pakistan Welding Institute, the nondestructive testing facility at Taxila, decades spent quietly ensuring that a technically demanding and politically sensitive programme kept working. Those achievements belong to the history books, and they are considerable. I will remember the orchard. I will remember a Cortado poured by a man who insisted the tea come before the tariff, and a lecture that never stopped even for lunch. That was his real gift — not just what he knew, but how completely he was willing to give his time to make sure someone else knew it too. Rest well, sir. The lesson stayed.

Federal Minister for Planning Ahsan Iqbal announced that the government will place the National Flood Protection Plan IV before the Council of Common Interests for approval. The price tag is now Rs 700 billion. The same plan was approved by the CCI in 2017 at roughly half that amount. The minister was candid: the previous governments failed to implement it, and the 2022 floods forced a revision. Nearly a decade and a half after the plan was first conceived after the 2010 floods that devastated the country, we are back where we started, except the bill has grown by Rs 360 billion. But there is a problem with the numbers, and it is not a small one. In November 2025, Secretary Water Resources Syed Ali Murtaza testified before the Senate Standing Committee on Water Resources that NFPP-IV comprised 375 schemes with a total cost of Rs 824.493 billion. The provincial component alone stood at Rs 746.961 billion, while the federal share was only Rs 77.533 billion. He told the committee that provinces had refused to contribute their shares, escalating the matter to the CCI. Eight months later, the same plan is being presented at Rs 700 billion with a 50-50 federal-provincial split. The total has been trimmed by roughly Rs 124 billion despite inflation and rising cost of construction, and the provinces’ burden has been halved. A plan that shrinks by fifteen percent despite the increased costs and flips its cost-sharing formula in eight months is not rigorously costed. It is still being negotiated politically, not finalized technically. After the 2022 floods, international donors pledged $11 billion for reconstruction and flood protection. Three years later, Pakistan had utilized less than $3 billion. Finance Minister Muhammad Aurangzeb admitted that Pakistan failed to prepare a single credible, bankable project to access the funds. The money sat in files while the people sat in mud and water. It is one thing to lack funds. It is quite another to hold the funds and lack the institutional capacity to spend them. So when the government now asks for Rs 700 billion, the question is not whether we need the plan. We do. The question is whether we have earned the right to spend it, or are simply paying compound interest on a decade of negligence. In 2017, When the CCI approved the National Flood Protection Plan in 2017, the Punjab Assembly had already passed the Flood Plain Regulation Act of 2016. That Act designated flood plains, mandated annual surveys, prohibited all construction without written permission, and criminalized unauthorized building. Section 20 gave it overriding effect over all other laws. It was a good, careful law. And for ten years, we ignored it. Then came the 2022 floods, killing more than 1,700 and displacing 33 million. The 2023 Punjab Irrigation Act, strengthened the framework further. . Then came the Infrastructure Audit Programme of January 2026, promising to inspect and certify every embankment before the rains. The NDMA had warned in November 2025 that the 2026 monsoon would bring 22 to 26 percent above-normal rainfall. In May, Chairman Lt Gen Inam Haider Malik was briefed the Emergency Response Committee. The warnings were not classified. They were reported in media across the country. And still, on July 31, as the Sawan rains continue and Bhadoon approaches, we are told that a Rs 700 billion plan is about to be placed before the CCI. The human cost of this incompetence is measured in lives, not spreadsheets. Between June 26 and July 25, 2026, NDMA recorded 97 deaths and 297 injuries in rain-related incidents. House and roof collapses were the leading cause, with Khyber Pakhtunkhwa reporting the highest toll, followed by Punjab. The authority evacuated 3,841 people. These are not abstract figures. They are preventable losses and deaths in a country that had years to prepare. Meanwhile, last year’s federal budget slashed water sector allocations by 27 percent, from Rs 184.6 billion to Rs 133.4 billion for the water sector. Even the flagship Diamer-Basha Dam saw reduced priority. The message is clear: politically visible projects win funding; invisible embankments lose it. We are also building vulnerability into the landscape faster than we are building protection. The hundred-arch bridge near Shahdara was designed a century ago to let Ravi floodwater pass freely. In September 2025, the M5 motorway near Jalalpur Pirwala collapsed after the Sutlej River breached its banks, blocking natural channels with inadequate culverts. Modern infrastructure is failing where century-old engineering succeeded because hydrology is no longer part of the design brief. Every stakeholder knows what needs to be done. District officials know where encroachments choke flood channels. Engineers know where embankments need reinforcement. Satellite imagery can map floodplains with precision. Yet these tools are shelved while development authorities continue to approve new roads, schools and BHUs for permanent dwellings that should not have been there to begin with.  New high profile housing schemes are regularized in natural river basins. The National Water Policy, approved by the CCI in April 2018, promised real-time telemetry by the end of 2021 and a National Water Council chaired by the Prime Minister to meet annually. Seven years later, the Council has convened only once, in October 2018. The telemetry system is five years past its deadline. The unfinished cost of ongoing water schemes stands at approximately Rs 1.27 trillion. What would it take to believe this time will be different? Not more money. We have enough money to drown in. What we lack is accountability that lives on the riverbank. The Infrastructure Audit of 2026 must be opened to the public, if it was ever done. The names of every certifying officer who signed off on an embankment must be known, and if a structure fails, the officer must stand beside it and explain. And if not, we need to ask why not? The early warning system must learn to speak to the village, not the province. Alerts must name villages and localaties, expected water levels, and designated evacuation routes. They

The government’s claims of containing power-sector circular debt have not survived the test of its own year-end figures. During the fiscal year (FY) 2025–26, another Rs. 364 billion was added to the flow of circular debt. This happened despite the provision of Rs. 302 billion in subsidies and repeated assurances that operational improvements, tariff adjustments, negotiations with independent power producers and financial restructuring had brought the problem under control. According to the latest report, the gross addition of Rs. 364 billion was Rs. 319 billion, or 709 percent, higher than in the preceding year. After using Rs. 302 billion of public money to reduce the accumulated liability, the reported stock still increased by about Rs. 61 billion from its June 2025 level of Rs.1.614 trillion. These numbers expose the difference between managing the recorded stock and stopping the recurring flow. A subsidy can reduce the amount appearing in the circular-debt account on a particular date. It cannot remove the inefficiencies, payment defaults, regulatory delays and governance failures that create new liabilities every month. The Power Division had taken a very different position earlier. Responding to reports that circular debt had risen during July–November 2025, it described the increase as seasonal and maintained that such variations normally reversed during the second half of the financial year. Its official rebuttal predicted that the circular-debt position would be fully contained by June 2026, with no net addition to the overall stock. The financial year has ended with a gross flow of Rs. 364 billion and a net increase even after a large fiscal injection. The promised reversal did not take place. The language of containment concealed continued deterioration in the financial operations of the power sector. The reported composition of the increase is equally disturbing. Inefficiencies of power distribution companies caused losses of Rs. 262 billion, only Rs. 3 billion less than in the preceding year. Lower recovery of electricity bills added Rs. 64 billion. Interest charges contributed another Rs. 14 billion, while delays in tariff adjustments added Rs. 75 billion. A further Rs. 194 billion arose from non-payment by K-Electric, reportedly connected with the delay in determining its multi-year tariff. This cannot be classified as an unavoidable commercial loss. It represents a failure of regulation, contract administration and timely governmental decision-making. When tariff determinations, subsidy decisions or payment settlements are delayed, the resulting liability does not disappear. It moves through the electricity chain until it is recorded as circular debt and passed to taxpayers or consumers. The reported components and adjustments must be examined carefully when the complete official statement is released. The latest report available on ministry’s website is of April 2026. The Power Division has not placed even its one-page circular-debt reports from May to July 2026 on its website. Public discussion is consequently being conducted based on figures reported in the press. The government cannot demand acceptance of its success narrative while withholding the underlying data required testing it. The Rs. 302 billion subsidy used to contain the closing stock was nearly half of the approximately Rs. 630 billion collected in income tax from salaried persons during the same year. This comparison shows the real social cost of power-sector failure. Citizens who have no role in managing distribution companies, finalising tariffs or settling inter-company disputes are required to finance the consequences through taxation. They also pay through electricity tariffs, surcharges, fuel-price adjustments and declining service quality. Honest consumers are charged for theft, poor recoveries, technical losses and delayed official decisions. As tariffs rise, more households and businesses with adequate resources shift to rooftop solar systems. The grid is left with a shrinking base of paying consumers and a large stock of fixed capacity costs. Tariffs must then be raised further to recover those costs from fewer units sold. The policy response itself deepens the financial problem. For more than a decade, governments and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) have relied heavily on tariff increases, periodic adjustments, withdrawal of subsidies and additional surcharges. These measures may narrow the accounting gap temporarily, but they do not establish commercial discipline within distribution companies or personal accountability for persistent losses. The IMF reportedly allowed up to Rs. 400 billion to be added to the circular-debt flow during FY 2025–26, while requiring the government to neutralise the addition through budgetary subsidies. This approach turns circular debt into an exercise in fiscal presentation. A liability generated inside the electricity system is paid from the federal budget and then described as contained. The loss has not been eliminated. Its location has changed. The same problem arises with the Rs. 1.225 trillion circular-debt settlement plan. Refinancing expensive liabilities at more favourable rates can reduce financing costs and provide immediate liquidity. It does not constitute retirement of debt in any economic sense when the replacement financing has to be repaid over six years through charges imposed on electricity consumers. Pakistan will be servicing yesterday’s circular debt while the unreformed system continues creating fresh liabilities. Financial engineering is being presented as reform because it postpones recognition of the full fiscal burden. Liquidity becomes a substitute for correcting the institutions responsible for the crisis. The proposed privatisation of the distribution companies also requires closer scrutiny. The government has started with Faisalabad, Gujranwala and Islamabad electricity supply companies, which are among the relatively better-performing entities. Selling profitable or manageable companies while retaining those responsible for the largest losses will not remove the structural deficit. It may deprive the public sector of its stronger revenue-generating assets while leaving taxpayers responsible for the weakest companies. Privatisation can improve performance where there is transparent valuation, effective regulation and genuine transfer of commercial risk. It cannot succeed if private investors acquire the sound operations while the state remains responsible for accumulated liabilities, political interference, theft-prone areas and unrecoverable receivables. That would amount to privatisation of gains and socialisation of losses. A credible reform programme must begin with full disclosure. Monthly circular-debt reports should identify, company by company, transmission and distribution losses, recovery ratios, unpaid

I have stood on the dry floor of the Aral Sea, and I can tell you that no photograph prepares you for it. It is not a desert in the way the Sahara is a desert, ancient and self-consistent. It is a wound — a seabed still faintly shaped like the water that used to cover it, salt crusted white across the sand, rusting fishing trawlers stranded kilometres from any shore, and children playing in the hulls of boats their grandfathers once sailed to catch sturgeon. It is, without exaggeration, the worst environmental tragedy I have ever witnessed with my own eyes. And I have spent thirty years of my life witnessing tragedies of water, in one direction or the other. The Aral Sea was once the fourth-largest inland body of water on Earth, spread across more than 68,000 square kilometres between what is now Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan, fed for centuries by the Amu Darya and Syr Darya rivers. Soviet planners diverted those rivers at massive scale to irrigate cotton fields, and the sea began to die — slowly at first, then catastrophically. More than ninety percent of it is gone. What remains has splintered into four smaller lakes covering barely 3,500 square kilometres. The fishing economy that once fed the region collapsed entirely. The exposed seabed, laced with agricultural pesticide residue and salt, now rises on the wind as toxic dust that settles on crops and in human lungs hundreds of kilometres away. Villages that once sat on the water’s edge now sit stranded in a dead landscape, and the world, for the most part, has forgotten this happened at all. That forgetting is its own quiet tragedy. I did not come to this subject as a tourist of disaster. I have spent three decades campaigning for the preservation of the Himalayan glacier system, including a sustained, and ultimately unsuccessful, effort to see the Siachen Glacier converted into a demilitarised peace park — a proposal grounded in a simple technical fact: Siachen is melting faster than almost any glacier on Earth, in significant part because of the sustained military presence stationed on its ice. I made the case, repeatedly, that removing that military footprint would slow a specific, measurable source of glacial loss, feeding directly into the Indus watershed that sustains hundreds of millions of people downstream. I did not succeed. The glacier continues to melt. The troops remain. I say this not as a complaint but as an honest accounting: I have given a large share of my working life to glacier preservation, and by the plainest measure — ice mass — I have not stopped the loss. That failure has not left me cynical. It has left me convinced that the scale of the response has to match the scale of the crisis, and that we have consistently chosen the smaller response. I think about this every time I look at the Maldives. It is a nation of low coral islands, its highest natural point barely more than two metres above sea level, and it is not speaking in metaphor when its own government has warned that the country could become uninhabitable, and eventually vanish beneath the waves, within this century if sea-level rise is not slowed. I do not think most people outside the region understand how literally existential that threat is. This is not a country that will lose some coastline. This is a country that could, within the lifetime of children alive today, cease to have any land at all. That is the other half of the water crisis I have spent my life watching, and it is the mirror image of the Aral. Where the Aral Sea disappeared because rivers were mismanaged and diverted without thought for the consequences, the oceans are rising because the atmosphere has absorbed decades of greenhouse gas emissions, and the ice sheets and glaciers that once held the planet’s frozen water in reserve are releasing it. Through most of the twentieth century, global sea levels rose at roughly 1.4 millimetres a year — barely perceptible within a human lifetime. Between 2006 and 2015, that rate had already accelerated to roughly 3.6 millimetres a year, and it continues to climb. A rise measured in inches sounds trivial until you understand what it does: it turns rare storm surges into routine flooding, drowns wetlands that once buffered coastal cities, backs up drainage systems and rivers, and makes what used to be called a hundred-year flood into a fixture of ordinary life. New York and Miami already experience “sunny-day flooding,” where nothing more than an unusually high tide sends seawater into city streets with no storm at all. Shanghai, Bangkok, Kolkata, Mumbai, and Dhaka — cities holding tens of millions of people and trillions of dollars of infrastructure — face the same mechanism at a scale that could displace populations larger than most countries. And the danger does not arrive gently. In July 2025, an 8.8-magnitude earthquake off Russia’s Kamchatka Peninsula — among the ten strongest ever recorded — sent tsunami warnings racing across the Pacific, triggering evacuations from Russia to Japan to Hawaii to the western coast of the United States. It was, by fortune more than design, a disaster the world mostly escaped. Scientists have been explicit that higher baseline sea levels make the next such event, and the next cyclone, more destructive than the last one would have been at a lower starting point. We are not simply facing more disasters. We are facing the same disasters arriving on a stage that has been quietly raised beneath them. I do not believe these two crises — a vanished inland sea and a rising global ocean — are separate stories. I believe they are the same failure, viewed from opposite ends of the same hydrological system: a civilisation that has never learned to treat the planet’s water as a single, finite, interconnected balance, to be managed with foresight rather than reordered by short-term convenience and corrected only after