India, Feb. 19 -- At a Pakistan-hosted Arria-Formula meeting of the United Nations Security Council on 31 January, Pakistan's Permanent Representative Asim Iftikhar Ahmad argued that India's suspension of the Indus Waters Treaty (IWT) is "not merely a bilateral concern" but a "test case for the international system". If a binding treaty governing shared natural resources can be set aside unilaterally, he warned, then no agreement anywhere is safe from politics.

It was a carefully timed intervention ahead of the UK and US presidencies of the Security Council, intended to pull the IWT out of its bilateral and technical setting and recast it as a question of global treaty sanctity and moral indictment. By this logic, India appears to be wea...