On Thursday, 28 May, EWI hosted the third installment of the Preventive Diplomacy Initiatives' dialogue series, Alternative Futures for Afghanistan and the Stability of Southwest Asia: Improving Regional Cooperation on Water in Brussels. The third session focused on the challenges to and opportunities for cooperation between Afghanistan and Pakistan on the water resources of the Kabul River Basin.

The policy dialogue series, organized with the support of the Gerda Henkel Stiftung, will result in an action-oriented policy paper and build towards an international conference on regional cooperation on water in early 2010.

In his opening address for the third installment of the series, EWI Vice President Ortwin Hennig stressed that participants must work to identify:

• The potential benefits of cooperation for all parties;
• The challenges and hurdles to be overcome in achieving that cooperation; and
• Practical steps to meet those challenges.

Rakhshan Roohi, Principal Scientific Officer of the Pakistan National Agricultural Research Council, and Seyyedali Hussaini of Afghanistan’s BANAB Consulting Engineers Company delivered keynote addresses.

The Benefits of Cooperation

Roohi overviewed the background of the Indus River system, of which the Kabul River is a part, and detailed its extensive use for irrigation in India and Pakistan. Her presentation pointed to the potential for growth that comes from transboundary cooperation on water management, as India and Pakistan’s history has shown. She stressed the importance of the Kabul River system in Afghanistan: 80% of the Afghan population relies on agriculture and 26% of Afghanistan is in the Kabul basin, making the basin crucial to Afghanistan’s development. Seyyedali Hussaini confirmed this assessment. Roohi also told the meeting that the World Bank was prepared to facilitate a bilateral treaty on the Kabul River, but both Afghanistan and Pakistan will need the political will to implement it.

A number of participants suggested that cooperation on the non-political, technical aspects of water could be a starting point for an eventual bilateral or regional treaty. They further suggested that the sharing of information and technical capacities would be an exercise in regional trust-building and could serve as a foundation for regional cooperation on other issues as well. A representative from the Science for Peace and Security Section at NATO pointed to the benefits of such cooperation in other regions, noting cooperation in the Caucasus on data-sharing, irrigation efficiency, and exploration of new water resources. Such an example could prove valuable in Southwest Asia as well.

Overcoming the Challenges

Participants identified the following challenges to improving regional cooperation on water:

• The expected increase in demand on the Kabul River’s capacity due to increasing population and infrastructure development such as dams and irrigation systems;
• The regional political situation, as exemplified by the decades-long border dispute between Afghanistan and Pakistan;
• The lack of essential hydrological data and technological capacity in Afghanistan; and
• The lack of the international community’s focus on water-related issues.

All participants agreed on the need to depoliticize the water issue. One suggested approach was to start at scientific and technical levels, with individual scientists cooperating on empirical and objective matters.

One participant identified water as an issue that could bring people together and stressed the need to educate local populations. Such education and training for farmers requires partners who can help local institutions inform people about water conservation, rational water usage, recycling and precision irrigation techniques, but such support has not been forthcoming. According to a representative from the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan, the mission is trying to address the water issue, and is looking to initiatives such as the United Nations Regional Centre for Preventive Diplomacy for Central Asia, but the international community is not focusing on these efforts.

Participants also noted that many universities and institutions have access to accurate scientific data and can serve as a base of knowledge on the water issue. But a representative from Russia’s Permanent Mission to NATO highlighted the global shortage of data-processing capacity. He noted that only a few supercomputers in the world that can predict the weather for seven days with a high degree of accuracy, and it is unreasonable to expect to predict water conditions over the next five to ten years. Water management requires the ability to think and plan for the long term, and that requires stronger global capacity to process available data.

Practical Steps

The participants agreed to the following steps to build a solid core of trust on which Pakistan and Afghanistan can improve cooperation on water and foster broader cooperation in other policy areas:

• The establishment of a joint, multi-disciplinary, scientific fact-finding working group to build a mutually agreed hydrological knowledge base on the Kabul River basin;
• The establishment of a bi-lateral Afghanistan-Pakistan water resources commission to review and negotiate hydro-power and agricultural development plans that affect both countries;
• Negotiate a bilateral treaty between Afghanistan and Pakistan on the use and management of the Kabul River’s water resources;
• Use existing frameworks such as the Economic Cooperation Organization and the bilateral Regional Economic Cooperation Conference on Afghanistan to include cooperative frameworks on water.

Looking Ahead

EWI will host the next session in the series on 25 June. The session will focus on both the Helmand River basin and the Harirud and Murghab rivers, which affect Afghanistan’s relations with Iran and Turkmenistan.