Himalayan glaciers are slowly melting and experts say the Indus River, a lifeline for farmers in Punjab and a hydropower source for Kashmir, will be the most affected in coming decades. There could be floods first but over the long haul water flows could drop dramatically – by much more than the amounts being fought over now.

“The river is a common resource – you can’t deal with this in an attitude of confrontation,” said Ashok Jaitly, director of the water resources division of Delhi-based environmental organization TERI. He said the two countries could improve their water usage dramatically by collaborating on storage projects and management generally.

There’s controversy over how fast the glaciers are melting. Witness the furor over the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s claim, based on now-debunked research, that the glaciers might melt away by 2035. (IPCC is chaired by TERI’s head, R.K. Pachauri, who has come under fire.) But most figures are still pretty dramatic: A 2005 World Bank report said there was a “terrifying” possibility of a 30% to 40% drip in Himalayan river flows within a century.

Okay, there’s a lot of time for India and Pakistan to get their act together. But judging by the war of words lately, they’re not on track to deal with this problem at all.

Kashmir is at the heart of the water problem since many of the key Indus tributaries at issue in the India-Pakistan dispute rise in the disputed territory and are the site of the Indian dams that are causing all the hubbub. That actually poses an opportunity, says B.G. Verghese, a veteran journalist and water expert at the Centre for Policy Research, a Delhi think tank.

He noted that it was none other than Gen. Pervez Musharraf who said during his tenure that India and Pakistan could resolve their problems in Kashmir by “making boundaries irrelevant.”

“What would make boundaries more irrelevant than joint management of rivers? It would be one of the most powerful cementing bonds of the two sides,” Mr. Verghese said.