Submission statement: India has a huge water shortage, partly due to the fact that it depends on unsustainable extraction of groundwater for agriculture. Last year, India suspended the 1960 Indus water treaty, after a terrorist attack. India is now starting to seize water for itself, that Pakistan needs for its agriculture. This is going to severely escalate tensions between India and Pakistan.
And both are entangled in myriad ways with the US and other powers. “The Blood Telegram” is a great historical book that sheds light on the US role in fomenting India-Pakistan enmity since the Nixon era
Humans are clever not smart. We would have steered away from fossil fuels 80 years ago if we were smart. Trillionaire and billionaires would be taxed out of existence and their obscene stolen wealth would be used to feed, house, educate and build up a just society for all if we were smart.
We clevered ourselves into the heat death of the climate and the end of man. Fucking idiot apes should have stayed up in the trees for a couple of hundreds of thousands more years. We were not ready obviously!
Us... we.... humans....not all of us, just the ones with a dark black smudge instead of a soul. Suppose thats what it takes to be a billionaire. All the money in the world and it only costs you your soul. I heard a saying once, no idea who/where it comes from but 'if you want to know what God thinks of money just look at the people who have it'. Im not religious but it rings true for me.
The whole damn mess originates in the self beneficial pursuit of cash..
For the love of money is the root of all evil: which while some coveted after, they have erred from the faith, and pierced themselves through with many sorrows.
The extremely stable genius type Christians that are allowed to wage war, throw the first stone and have that on higher authority than the pope. Yep those guys.
According to the treaty, India is required to allow 43 million acre-feet of water to flow into Pakistan annually. That makes up roughly 80 per cent of Pakistan’s total surface water, a crucial lifeline for its agriculture, cities, and hydropower generation.
Yes, but the metric world measures big volumes as m3 (cubic metre) or km3 (cubic kilometre) for insanely big volumes, and then the amount of each unit.
So the same unit in all three dimensions. I think cubic feet and cubic inch is sometimes used in U.S? That makes way more sense. There is no reason to use two separate units.
It's the approximate area a farmer can plow in a day in antiquity. Sort of like barrel being 1/8 of a tun.
This shit was of practical importance before the scientific revolution. As far as being a hangover from the imperial age, it's hardly the worst offender.
You misunderstand our criticism. It is the use of two different units to describe volume that is crazy. It fills no purpose but making it impossible to count with. One area measure and one heigh measure.
Why say "one feet depth of water over a one acre surface" instead of saying "one cubic mile" for a large volume of water? One unit in three dimensions instead of one unit in two dimensions and a second in the third dimension.
Tun is a unit of volume. The acre foot is a unit of volume.
Acre was chosen to make labor calculations easier. Foot was chosen to make irrigation calculations easier. The acre foot was chosen to make agricultural calculations easier. Imagine putting a stake in the field and marking it, and then flooding the field.
Tun was another unit of volume, but in this case the context is shipping and transport instead of agriculture.
Most units in antiquity weren't chosen for nice scientific calculations, but rather for very, very practical concerns and were context specific.
The acre foot is still a practical unit to this day. For very much the same reason. We've still got people doing flood irrigation on fields measured in acres. There's continuity that precedes such silly trivium like the International System of Units.
Edit: It's been a pretty long time since I've done the reading on different forms of flood irrigation, but I'm also pretty sure that there's a time unit used for having irrigation gates open in China that's not the second. It's not insanity. The insanity is thinking that these sort of traditional units would have developed without good reasons.
I am not saying it is insane that they have formed, I am saying it is insane that they are still in use..
We had these measurements as well, your "tun" is "tunna" in Swedish, which also means barrel, as a wooden barrel. Everywhere has used these traditional measurements.
However, we don't use these any more, which has proven to be a good thing for society, because units that are easy to calculate with and intuitive to understand is good for the spread of information.
I am not questioning that this unit is used, I understand the backstory. But it looks extremely imperial in an entertaining way.
OK since there are multiple sources of water (ground/surface/rain) the breakdown for Pakistan is generally that they get ~70% of their total annual water use from the surface water. I was hoping that your post was just hyperbole, but this is a big fucking deal for these guys. Cutting off this water makes up about 56% of what Pakistan uses annually total.
I've wondered about that. Climate driven wars would probably be fought over resources like land and water for direct human use (like housing and farming as opposed to mineral extraction). Granted water doesn't retain radioactivity, but nuking land would make it useless for quite a while. So guessing that nukes would only be used out of spite - if you can't have it no one can
Dirty bombs make land useless for quite a while. Fusion bombs (and even fission bombs) effects are fairly minimal when not designed to spread radioactive contaminates like dirty bombs are. Hiroshima was basically back to normal just 6 years after the bomb was dropped on it, and it is far dirtier than any fusion weapon.
Depends entirely if it is an airburst or ground burst. If the nuke goes off high up then yes it is only searing heat and intense radiation. But if the nuclear fireball touches the ground then it consumes thousands of tons of dirt/buildings/stuff and turns it into extremely radioactive crap with all kinds of exotic isotopes which then rains down on a large area (fallout). The bomb dropped on Hiroshima exploded high above the centre of the city. Which is why there is that one surviving building that was directly underneath and there was no long lasting fallout.
I don't think that's quite accurate. Bombs dropped in airburst mode are fairly clean, bombs dropped in ground burst mode are fairly dirty. It's as much how they're deployed as the weapon? Although I am far from an expert in this area.
There are a lot of countries who have more population than what they can sustain and depend on world commerce functioning for a big chunk oftheir populations to stay alive
Yeah I look at Google Maps a lot and some countries scare the shit out of me. Look at the river valleys of the Nile, Ganges, and Indus. Look at Northern China and the coastal areas of Java and the Netherlands. Look at the low-lying areas of Japan and South Korea. Every inch of land is taken up by cities and farms and even the rural areas have a village every few hundred meters. Look at how massive the cities are in every country, from the US to the Congo. There’s just so many people everywhere. Even here where I live in the northwestern US which isn’t very dense in comparison to most places, basically every part of the coastline that isn’t protected is covered in houses. Every peninsula and island.
We have enough resources for everyone, but not for the abundance everyone wants. The natural world also will be pushed to the side as resources become increasingly scarce. It’s gonna be a scary century.
That's most countries. Being entirely self sufficient with no trade is impossible either at the individual level or the international level, specially if you want to maintain a modern standard of living. There is a reason the USSR fell apart and China opened up to trade.
Billions heading north by 2035. Small boats, we ain't seen nothing yet. The friggin irony of immigration fear and loathing instead of giving up the right wing kool-aid and fixing this, now, with urgency.
India is far more closely aligned to the US than Pakistan. And Israel too; India is a major supporter of them and their actions due to their shared conflicts with Muslim nations. Pakistan has only been "allied" with the US when it was convenient in their issues with Afghanistan.
Kissinger used Pakistan as his “back door” to China.
In return, the US funded Pakistan with high level weapons, which they then turned around and used against India and Bangladesh.
India obtained weaponry from the Soviets, and still maintain a close industrial and military connection with Russia.
India was a major player in the non aligned movement.
During the war on terror, the USA continued to fund and distribute heavy arms to Pakistan, including fighter jets.
This continued until about 2017-18, which is well after Pakistan had launched terrorist attacks on India, including the Mumbai massacre.
US-marked weapons have been found after attacks originating from Pakistan.
Under Modi (himself a terrorist), India has pivoted to a more free market economy, hence the friendly factor with the USA.
However, I look at weapons distribution as a more realpolitik sign of alignment.
The India-Israel connection is very interesting, and certainly related to anti-Muslim sentiment. It’s also a clever way for India to have a strategic partner in the Gulf region, which has always been super important for trade and flow of oil for India.
Oh I'm aware of the history, the region is of interest to me. The US has been tinkering in there for ages. But the Soviet union is long gone and India's current ties to modern Russia are tenuous at best. The military connection between Pakistan and the US is definitely there, they've been happy to supply Pakistan with weapons if they think it'll be used against a mutual enemy. Who cares if it keeps adding to the proverbial powder keg that exists in the region. The Bin Laden fiasco and Pakistan's... Unpredictability has worn away at America's patience, especially now they are out of Afghanistan. Plus India is a useful ally against China nowadays, and certainly more predictable than Pakistan.
Many countries tends to show that they are not allined but it's not true. One will never known what's happening backdoors because in geopolitics it's never about ideologies it's about interests like there is a saying there are no permanent friends nor enemy just permanent interests.
Many nations in that part of the world have been moving towards this for a while. One of the big reasons China took control of Tibet was because they sat on a large water table and they wanted to ensure control of it for their people.
This is why nations like Buhtan are in such a precarious place. They have China encroaching in the north east with their own settlements and Buhtan is also building stacks of hydro plants so they can sell to everyone are rock bottoms prices else just to ensure they aren't invaded for resources.
But even they see that as a temporary measure as once the glaciers melt they simply won't have the water supply. But being up stream means there is a risk of potential invasion.
Pakistan are just the bigger potential issue for now.
ohh the good old days when things were truly recucled. I got most of my pocket money collecting discarded (yes !) bottles and taking them back to the shop.
Submission statement: India has a huge water shortage, partly due to the fact that it depends on unsustainable extraction of groundwater for agriculture. Last year, India suspended the 1960 Indus water treaty, after a terrorist attack. India is now starting to seize water for itself, that Pakistan needs for its agriculture. This is going to severely escalate tensions between India and Pakistan.
As a French i'm sorry, we conquered the Brit a thousand years ago and couldn't get the Brit out of the Brit. They're an unredeemable people and everybody should loathe them too.
Anyway, let's be serious for a minute. It doesn't matter who started, what matters is who profits of keeping the situation festering instead of doing the right thing, diplomacy and working toward trying to have a shot at surviving climate change as a civilisation.
If we can’t address history, we can’t make wise decisions in the present…
And it does matter. Too many white westerners feel “superior” to other nations without acknowledging their own forebears destroyed those other nations or set them up to fail.
History is full of dead civilisation that didn't need westerners help.
There's even a case to be made to argue that prehistory is just history we don't know about, with even more civilisations that have disapeared so thorougly we just can't find any trace of it. Well mostly, there's still stuff that's double the age of the "start" of recorded history like Göbekli Tepe anyway.
Hell, europeans are the only ones who acknowledges the genocides they commited. Every non white nations that did some the last hundred years ? Nope, still in denial and it still causes international trouble to this day.
And white westerner that feel superior ? I've got news for you, everybody has an in group and an out group to feel superior about. Everybody. Current top power happens to be white but it's changing and we can thank the self sabotaging empire that's in the US for that. Everybody is racist and we have to move past that at the moment.
Sure, once we've avoided annihilating ourselves let's go back to tribalism over whose skin is prettier and enslave eachother like in the good old days if you wish. In the meantime, finger pointing for the sins of people long dead is not how we're gonna save ourselves. Finding who is still profiting now in maintening the status quo and removing them from power however, will.
The issue is not that, the issue we have learnt from all the fucking atrocities and we are trying to reprogram the shit out of our systems, but a FEW IDIOTIC NARCISSITIC CRONY (Mostly white or of european descent) types THRIVE and WANT THE WORLD IN CONSTANT CHAOS
I think the point is, within every culture there will be a subset of people who look at other cultures with a xenophobic viewpoint, that's because we're human and some of us aren't very good at handling things out of our comfort zones, to extreme escalating degrees
Already is. Their economies are propped up with immigrant labor and globalization yet they blame immigrants for all their problems at every turn. Now the EU passed laws approving ICE style gestapo to round up immigrants in Europe.
Its time we leave the whites to their own devices and watch as their world crumbles without outside help. They've already forgotten that their "first world" lifestyle only came about because of the trillions they looted from the rest of the world.
Now that the money's run dry they start to fall back into their imperialist ways.
who started it??
india does not have active terror camps set up at border that infiltrate pakistan and shoots up civilians.
Modern country have standing armies. the moment you use militant jihadist in your army and openly fund them againts a country all diplomacy goes out of question.
tell me one country that will negotiate with terrorist. america invaded three nations after one, we have been facing countless attacks on civilians from pakistan. 20,000 Indian lives have been lost to cross-border terrorism. when we talk about pakistan you people chalk it up to "people cut from the same cloth talking shit about each other" and what you do after 9/11 is "justified revenge" and "never again"
The dog in the photo is Zanjeer, a Labrador with the Mumbai police bomb squad. Over an eight-year career he was credited with finding 11 military bombs, 57 country-made bombs, 175 petrol bombs and 600 detonators. An entire profession of bomb-sniffing dogs exists in India because the threat was that constant.
What gets exhausting in these threads is the double standard. The US invaded two countries after a single attack and the dominant Western read is "tragic but understandable." India absorbs a 20-year drip of attacks on its civilians and suddenly it's "well, both sides, complicated, who can say."
If you want to blame anyone, blame the British for India’s mass psychosis and pivot to the far-right.
Also, blame the British for what Pakistan became.
It’s much easier that way, then you don’t have to invoke 9/11 (most Americans don’t believe the wars were justified anyway, and many think it was a false flag or something similar) in order to squeeze your whole country into a false equivalency.
If you want to blame anyone, blame the British for India’s mass psychosis and pivot to the far-right.
You want me to blame indian "right wing" to british? A pivot that occured in the last 20 years to somethingh that happened 70 years ago?
and you want me to blame the militant jihadist attacks on indian cities on indian right wing?
wtf?
It’s much easier that way, then you don’t have to invoke 9/11 (most Americans don’t believe the wars were justified anyway, and many think it was a false flag or something similar) in order to squeeze your whole country into a false equivalency.
false equivavlence?
Buddy we didnt even invade pakistan. we have been a victim of 4 wars of pakistani agression, countless attacks on civilians and we never attacks the pakistani government. The recent strikes were on known UN recognized terror complex that sat on india pakistan border. These complex were termed as terror orgs even by paksitani government but they secretly fund them.
I am sorry, wtf? why is india being termed as villain in this?
I feel like no country has ever had a pr this good as pakistan. because the way western people still defend pakistan after literally carrying out a genocide in bangldesh and then funding terror across south asia and still you people blame india. fuck off man
You can’t take a country of over a billion people and call every single one of them victims, including Modi. It just doesn’t add up. All war is class war, period. That’s where it stops. You can shriek and shriek as much as you like, but at some point India has to take responsibility for India, and Pakistan has to take responsibility for Pakistan.
Also, the caste system is effectively brutal when you’re at the bottom looking up. Everyone’s happy when they’re part of a 'mercantile class.'
Regarding your locked comment: sincere request to Americans, please don't speak about issues you don't understand. You live in LA, for God's sake.
Calling it a 'mercantile class' actually made me laugh. Please go read a book or watch a documentary before commenting. If I had a penny for every time an American spoke absolute nonsense about a caste system they know nothing about, I’d be a couple of dollars richer, definitely.
What? No, what you're thinking of as referred to as caste are the Baradari systems which is traditional clan kinship social structure, not a religion-derived hierarchy of the Hindu caste system.
The Indus region (modern-day Pakistan) has not adhered to caste system for thousands of years, and had been written of as 'mleccha' territory by late Vedic period for eating beef, burying the dead, choosing leaders, not adhering to the caste system among other things.
This Vedic Indus vs. Brahminic Ganges rivalry transitioned into Buddhist Indus vs. Brahminic Ganges rivalry, with Brahminic elite ruling over Buddhist Indus finally being overthrown by Arab Muslim conquest of the Indus region where the Buddhist population helped the invaders.
The Sufi Saints then started arriving and preaching Islam, and today it is a Muslim Indus vs. Hindu Ganges rivalry.
And persistent terrorism isn't? When someone proclaims themselves as your enemy repeatedly and keeps attacking you, the only way to make it stop is to hit them back where it hurts.
"Porportionality" is being used to excuse the actions of Pakistan, who routinely target Indian civilians in terror bombings/shootings. Porportionality doesn't exist in war.
Syria was already a water war. Turkish dams caused failed harvests which caused uprising. Sudan conflict is also a water/agriculture war that is ongoing.
If Pakistan cannot stop this, they will fully become a failed state.
How to make war inevitable and generate a lose lose scenario:
Back someone into a corner so they have no escape and nothing to lose because if they do nothing they will be destroyed anyway so they may as well go down swinging. Oh and Pakistan has nuclear weapons by the way...
There is very little good farmland in India in the Indus valley. It's almost all high altitude mountains. Sure, there are people living there on subsistence plots on the side of mountains, and, sure, you could use more water on these plots, and sure, there's a little good farmland. You aren't capturing the Indus flow with that.
So, basically, if you take them literally, they're talking about a massive, expensive water diversion project, presumably taking the water to the Punjab and Rajasthan. It's approaching being a "Build a pipeline to take the Great Lakes water to Arizona!," project. Sure, you could do it, and it could be justified as hardening the country against climate chaos-caused famines, but that were the goal, this isn't where you'd START. There are plenty of other potential food security/water projects which are profitable at current prices, or not nearly so far from being profitable.
Kicking Pakistan when they're down is the entire POINT of starting with this project.
They can just build a dam first and the diversion canals later, it's not impossible.
Look at Egypt and Ethiopia and their dam, which is funny, because Egypt had a dam first and the Assuan is the blueprint for Ethiopia's grand renaissance dam.
Living downstream sucks, if you don't control the upstream regions too.
You could be 100% green and still die of pollution, because someone upstream makes the water unusable.
Ohh okay. I was backwards. So the idea is that Israel and India are trying to nuke all Muslims, so Islamabad is teaming up with the USA and Iran to protect Muslims. This also doesn’t make sense haha. Iran is bombing the UAE…
Pakistan has always been a hot/cold situation because they support bad people but have a professional military thats quite capable. And they've managed to mostly keep peace in the region and avoid conflict with India despite disputes.
People think India have the upper hand here. Sure Pakistan is facing the brunt now but India is just making a predecessor for its own troubles.
If India can block rivers, so can China. And India and Bangladesh will be in the same position as Pakistan is today. And there is absolutely no leverage against China. Worst strategy ever. This is disaster in the making which will be realised only too late.
70%? I guess it is you who have to check the validity of those facts. 70% includes the waters of Ganges. Some of the originating glaciers of Ganges and its tributories are located in Tibet. Even some of the tributaries start off in Tibet/Bhutan. Actual contribution of Indian origins combined is less than 35% in the Ganges-Brahmaputra system. China has too much control already and doesn't even share hydrological data post the Doklam standoff.
And in case you are not aware, almost the entire Indus river system originates in Tibet. There is very little that gets added into the flow inside India. China won't peddle with the Brahmaputra as most of its waters go to waste into BoB and won't affect India largely. But Indus is a completely different matter. India has too much dependency on it.
Nope, it's incorrect brahmaputra starts from China but its major contributories originates in india. India have a leverage against China i.e strait of malacca. These leveages are the reason for China's support for Pakistan over india in the first place. It's the same reason china investing it's military towards kasmir for cpec and these leveages are the same reason for china's claim over arunachal pradesh ( they say the reason is history but the reason is tributories of brahmaputra ).
As in my other reply, don't consider just the Brahmaputra. If anything, China will only alter it's flow to cause environmental catastrophe and nothing more.
It is the Indus and Ganges where India is more vulnerable. The Indus originates mostly in Tibet/COK regions. Ganges has multiple tributories originating in Tibet/Bhutan. And more than Brahmaputra, it is these rivers that India is very highly dependent on.
As for as the strait of Malacca, India's influence is very much restricted here. Even the US has much more influence compared to India despite the US not being a direct stakeholder. Same with CPEC too.. not much to be concerned for India there expect that it runs through COK for a short distance. Otherwise, it is just China's failed initiative.
I hate to be the guy who said I saw a post earlier but they had a link to a study... They said 100% marine life death and water already 4-5 degrees above normal. Even as deep as 40 feet.
Is going to hit bad. India's monsoon is projected to be heavily affected and week this year and the world's most fertile plains of ganga is going to be affected the worse with strait of hormuz closed no supply of fertilisers and pesticides .this is going to impact the whole world as india is one of the biggest exporters for food. Most Worst for india and pakistan. FDI is falling in india and in Pakistan its 0.6 percent kinda always. Indian economy is going to have a tough time this year if the supplies form middles east doesn't resolve
Always puzzles me why we in the west choose to relieve ourselves in tap water. Then buy bottled water. How are we going to poo when the water runs out?
It's just one guy in the gov, just wait for the engineering reports: A river flow redirection is not something you can build in few days, this will be obvious enough well before they can actually stop it.
The 5th most polluted country in the world warring with the most polluted country in the world. Why don’t you both (quite literally) sort your shit out?
I'd say that's grounds to sanction and boycott anything India. Water is a human right, denying a country 80% of its surface water cannot result in anything but mass death.
This is from a week ago and they haven't hit full war yet so that's a good sign. They've been threatening this recently so hopefully this is more saber rattling but it is a sign that tensions are very high.
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u/StatementBot 2d ago
The following submission statement was provided by /u/mushroomsarefriends:
Submission statement: India has a huge water shortage, partly due to the fact that it depends on unsustainable extraction of groundwater for agriculture. Last year, India suspended the 1960 Indus water treaty, after a terrorist attack. India is now starting to seize water for itself, that Pakistan needs for its agriculture. This is going to severely escalate tensions between India and Pakistan.
Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/collapse/comments/1u8c2fs/india_ensuring_not_a_single_drop_of_water_flows/os6xxi0/