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WB to facilitate water treaty with Afghanistan

By Khalid Mustafa

ISLAMABAD: The World Bank (WB) has agreed to facilitate the signing of a water treaty between Pakistan and Afghanistan but has refused to become the guarantor of the treaty. The bank is the guarantor of the Indus Waters Treaty between Pakistan and India.

According to a senior government official, the WB is willing to be the facilitator, but does not see the need to provide any guarantees since, in its view, the treaty is between two friendly Muslim countries between whom there were no hostilities such as there were between India and Pakistan.

The official said that the WB had asked one of the United Nations (UN) agencies to help collect data on water from the upper riparian country, Afghanistan. The official said this data was required for the draft of the treaty and work on its collection had already started. The Pakistani government was in contact with Kabul through the World Bank, he said.

Islamabad and Kabul had felt that there ought to be a treaty between them on the sharing of the water of the Kabul and the Kunhar rivers and other tributaries entering Pakistan from Afghanistan. For this, the Government of Pakistan formed a nine-member committee on September 9, 2003 headed by the chairman of the Flood Commission. The commissioner of Pakistan’s Permanent Commission of Indus Water (PCIW), Lahore, is the secretary of the committee. Member Water of WAPDA, the director general of the Foreign Office for Afghanistan and ECO countries, the joint secretary of the Law and Justice Ministry, the additional chief secretary of NWFP, the additional secretary of Balochistan, the managing director of the National Engineering Services of Pakistan and the chairman of the Indus River System Authority are members of the committee.

“The committee was given the task of making a draft of the water treaty within three months, but it failed to do so because Afghan authorities did not cooperate with it,” the government official said. Now the WB will help draw up the draft of the treaty, he said.

The official said Afghanistan wished to start a hydroelectric project on the Kabul River and develop the Kama irrigation project, which was why both countries felt the need for a water treaty to ensure that the rights of the lower riparian state were protected.

He said the nine-member committee had prepared an interim report which states that about 17 million acre feet (MAF) water enters Pakistan through the Kabul River every year. Currently, Afghanistan irrigates 12,000 acres of land with water from the Kabul River. If the Karzai government goes ahead with its hydroelectric project on the river and the Kama irrigation project, then it would be able to irrigate another 14,000 acres, using another 0.5 MAF of water. The interim report, which will be submitted to the government within the next few days, said that a reduction of 0.5 MAF of water in the Kabul River would have a negligible effect on Pakistan’s water share, the official said.

The report also states that the Afghan government had not provided the data required for finalising the Water Treaty draft. The official said that in the interim report, the nine-member committee has also recommended that the Government of Pakistan take steps to ensure that the required information was received from the Kabul government especially regarding any large water projects that Afghanistan might undertake in the future.

The interim report also said that the NWFP and Balochistan governments had failed to provide accurate information of water discharges at various locations on the rivers flowing into their areas from Afghanistan, including the rivers Kabul, Kaitur, Tochi and Gomal, the official said. To a question, the official said that there was a water treaty signed in 1921 between Afghanistan and the British Government of India, but it did not contain enough detail to form the basis for a future water treaty with Kabul.

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