Water Politics in the Amu Darya and Syr Darya

The Amu Darya and Syr Darya, Central Asia's two great rivers, together drain the glaciers and snowfields of the Pamir and Tian Shan mountains and historically supplied virtually all the water that made agriculture possible across the arid lowlands of Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, and southern Kazakhstan; the Amu Darya, at roughly 2,400 kilometers the longer of the two, rises from the Pamir glaciers on the Tajik–Afghan border, while the Syr Darya, around 2,200 kilometers long, originates in the Fergana Valley fed by the Tian Shan. Both rivers historically terminated in the Aral Sea, and Soviet-era planners treated the entire basin as a single hydrological unit to be managed centrally from Moscow, a coordination mechanism that dissolved instantly and completely when the five Central Asian republics became independent states in 1991, each with its own national interest in the shared water.