Ethiopia is sometimes called Africa’s water tower, due to its high elevation, Tim Marshall explains (in Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Explain Everything About the World), and has more than twenty dams fed by the rainfall in its highlands:
In 2011, Addis Ababa announced a joint project with China to build a massive hydroelectric project on the Blue Nile near the Sudanese border called the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam, scheduled to be finished by 2020. The dam will be used to create electricity, and the flow to Egypt should continue; but in theory the dam could also hold a year’s worth of water, and completion of the project would give Ethiopia the potential to hold the water for its own use, thus drastically reducing the flow into Egypt.
As things stand, Egypt has a more powerful military, but that is slowly changing, and Ethiopia, a country of 96 million people, is a growing power. Cairo knows this, and also that, once the dam is built, destroying it would create a flooding catastrophe in both Ethiopia and Sudan. However, at the moment it does not have a casus belli to strike before completion, and despite the fact that a cabinet minister was recently caught on microphone recommending bombing, the next few years are more likely to see intense negotiations, with Egypt wanting cast-iron guarantees that the flow will never be stopped. Water wars are considered to be among the imminent conflicts this century, and this is one to watch.
As their country could get half-annihilated in mere hours were Aswan to suddenly crumble, any Egyptian official should be very hesitant to say or do anything that tends to nudge attitudes about “blowing up dams” from “off limits” to “fair game according to your own espoused principles”.
For years I’ve been reading that the next big water crisis will happen in Yemen, and it must be awfully hard these days for the Israelis to resist knocking out the infrastructure currently pumping those aquifers dry.
Actually, wait, no, I’m wrong, it’s more strategic in the long run to just let the Yemenis keep rapidly exhausting those reserves. In fact, Israel would be smart to help them do it even faster, send them lots of free drilling rigs and electrical pumps and solar panels (less diversion potential for militants than motor fuel) and even have the chutzpah to call it humanitarian assistance. Heck, don’t stop there, subsidize the export of Yemeni khat so that the Yemenis focus on their most water-intensive product and use their supplies up even faster. Devious.
Handle, you sound like the guy who wiped me out so badly at chess dot com recently.