The silence of a state can sometimes be louder than the calamity it refuses to confront, and today Pakistan stands drowned beneath the weight of such silence. Our glaciers, those towering sentinels of purity, those ancient guardians of our rivers and our future, are melting. They are crying. They are collapsing. And for decades, the Ministries of Climate Change and Foreign Affairs have chosen to remain mute, timid, uninterested—as if the vanishing of our frozen lifeblood were merely a seasonal inconvenience, easily ignored, easily forgotten.
On December 8, Field Marshal Asim Munir, in his inaugural address as CDF and COAS, reminded the country that the age of new warfare has arrived and that Pakistan must prepare for emerging threats that transcend guns and missiles. After praising the resolve shown during “Marka-i-Haq”, he warned India with unequivocal firmness, promising a “much more swift and severe” response to any illusions of adventurism. Yet even his resolute words cast a long shadow, for beneath our traditional military strength lies a neglected front far more threatening: water, energy, and economic security. A fortress may withstand armies, but it cannot outlast a dying water tower.
The tragedy deepened a few days ago when India announced that the Detailed Project Report of the colossal Bilaspur–Manali–Leh Railway Line was ready for execution—a USD 15–17 billion infrastructure artery engineered not merely for development, but for strategic military advantage. Six days. Just six days ago, the truth crashed upon me like an avalanche. For over a decade, I laboured to demilitarise the Siachen Glacier, to convert it into a peace park, a shared sanctuary, a symbol of South Asian ecological diplomacy. The Siachen Glacier, our great water bank, our icy vault against future drought, was my life’s commitment. And now India moves to carve steel into this fragile Himalayan spine.
This railway, connecting Himachal Pradesh to Ladakh, has been declared by India’s Ministry of Defence as vital for the rapid deployment of troops and supplies into Ladakh and the Siachen region. Annexures of its Preliminary Project Reports, shocking in their brazenness, show potential extensions reaching across Khardung La towards Siachen Base Camp. It is not simply a railway. It is a military corridor piercing directly through a region already buckling under climate stress. And beneath this engineering triumph lies an ecological funeral.
How devastating it is that the moment India one day admits, because it will have to, that Siachen, the second-largest glacier outside the poles, is melting at an unprecedented rate, it will simultaneously be advancing the very infrastructure accelerating that melt. Glaciers are not a metaphor; they are indicators of climate change. And every human intrusion, every blast, every tunnel, every steel rail tears at the fragile equilibrium of the Himalaya, the great climatic regulator of South Asia. The mountain does not scream, but it breaks.
Accelerated glacial retreat is no longer a theory; it is a documented fact
My memory cannot detach from the remarkable commitment of the late Dr R. K. Pachauri, chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, who once stood firmly behind the idea of Siachen as a peace park. India had, at one delicate moment, agreed to withdraw from the glacier, contingent merely on demarcating the Actual Line of Control. It was one of the most promising initiatives of ecological diplomacy between two nuclear states. And then came May 2014. Narendra Modi rose to power, and with him died the last breath of that possibility.
What wounded me further was not India’s shift in posture, but Pakistan’s indifference. The Foreign Office never treated this glacier as the ecological treasure it is. Their refusal to engage revealed a frightening disconnect from the immensity of what was at stake.
For how can one ignore that the Siachen Glacier holds approximately 1,631 cubic kilometres of ice—1,322 million acre-feet? This is not a number; it is an existential truth. Tarbela Dam, our pride, holds only 7 million acre-feet. The Siachen Glacier holds the equivalent of 188 Tarbela Dams. One hundred and eighty-eight reservoirs of life. One hundred and eighty-eight futures for our crops, our energy, our stability. And we treat this with bureaucratic apathy, as if the glacier were merely an ice sculpture instead of the very spine of our hydrological security. The tears of the mountain are beginning to fall, and with them, the lifeblood of the Indus Basin will drain into an irreversible void.
Throughout my career, I raised technical, engineering, and environmental concerns regarding hydropower projects in Indian-held Kashmir and Himachal Pradesh. My concerns were never political. They were rooted in science, engineering duty, and a reverence for the delicate ecology of the Himalaya. I fought to preserve 60,000 kanals of ancient forest in Patriata, defended fragile watersheds, and proposed Siachen as a Peace Park—an idea later acknowledged internationally as a model for transboundary environmental cooperation. These were not gestures; they were commitments to align law, science, and ethics.
But nothing has shattered me as deeply as the ecological recklessness surrounding this railway project. The Himalaya, the “Third Pole”, stores the greatest volume of snow and ice outside the Arctic and Antarctic, as documented by leading global studies, including Nature Reviews Earth & Environment. These mountains feed the Indus, Ganges, and Brahmaputra basins. They regulate monsoons, temperature gradients, and precipitation cycles. More than 1.5 billion people depend on this system. And yet India is driving high-altitude railways and tunnels into the very structure that sustains South Asia’s water, while simultaneously acknowledging in its own environmental documents that the Himalaya functions as a regulator of climate. The contradiction is tragic.
Accelerated glacial retreat is no longer a theory; it is a documented fact. Glacial lake outburst floods are rising. Hydrological imbalances are increasing. These changes will devastate agriculture, hydropower, and freshwater flows from the Indus Basin to the Bay of Bengal.
When they study how Pakistan lost its glaciers, they will find that our governments did not merely fail to act—they chose silence. And silence, in the death of the Himalaya, is the most unforgivable crime of all
International law is clear. The United Nations Convention on the Non-Navigational Uses of International Watercourses of 1997 requires states to prevent significant transboundary harm. The Espoo Convention mandates prior notification and environmental assessment for projects likely to impact neighbouring states. The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, the Convention on Biological Diversity, the Stockholm Declaration, and the Rio Declaration enshrine precaution, intergenerational equity, and the duty to protect fragile ecosystems. All these frameworks stand violated by India’s Himalayan militarisation. Yet Pakistan has not taken a single robust legal or diplomatic step.
The International Court of Justice, under Article 36, has previously adjudicated similar environmental disputes, such as the Pulp Mills case and the Nicaragua border activities case. Our case is legally strong. Even the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, under Article 8(2)(b)(iv), identifies intentional environmental destruction causing widespread, severe, and long-term damage as a war crime when disproportionate to military advantage. If deliberate hydrological disruption of the Himalaya is proven, this project could fall within that definition. But will our ministries act? Experience suggests otherwise. These matters are technical, scientific, and legally intricate—territory from which our bureaucracy habitually retreats.
The irony grew unbearable when the Supreme Court of India, in a suo motu notice on 23 September 2025, warned that Himachal Pradesh might “vanish from the map” if ecological degradation continued. The National Green Tribunal of India has examined proposals to declare the Higher Himalaya an eco-sensitive zone. These are admissions by Indian institutions themselves. If India’s own judiciary foresees the collapse of its mountains, what catastrophe awaits downstream Pakistan, where the Indus, Jhelum, Chenab, Sutlej, and Ravi originate in the same climatic and geological system? A disturbance in one segment disturbs the entire basin’s sediment, flow, and ecological equilibrium.
Meanwhile, our Ministry of Climate Change has confessed ignorance of something as basic as a transboundary environmental impact assessment. They knew nothing of the Zojila Tunnel’s transboundary implications. And what surrounds the Ministry? A flourishing non-governmental organisation ecosystem endlessly holding seminars in five-star hotels, producing glossy reports with recycled phrases, speaking of climate change in abstract poetry while the mountains crumble. If the Auditor General of Pakistan were to conduct a performance audit, as India and Bangladesh already do, almost nothing tangible would be found on the ground. The only reliable measure is Pakistan’s rising greenhouse gas emissions dataset—speaking louder than their empty rhetoric.
Climate change engineering, an advanced discipline involving the removal of greenhouse gases and solar radiation management, is left in the hands of pseudo-experts whose primary skill is rearranging fashionable vocabulary. Those who should understand glaciology, hydrology, physics, risk modelling, structural geology, and atmospheric chemistry are absent from the conversation. The void is fatal.
I cannot request Field Marshal Asim Munir to step into this arena. Not yet. Not directly. But I know that one day, as in the United States and India, our Chief of Defence Staff will inevitably recognise that water, energy, and economic security are pillars of national defence. A nation without water is a nation without power—military power, economic power, and social stability. This is the foundation of national security.
And so I leave these words as a note for the future, a footnote for those yet to inherit this land. When they study how Pakistan lost its glaciers, they will find that our governments did not merely fail to act—they chose silence. And silence, in the death of the Himalaya, is the most unforgivable crime of all.