This chapter highlights the confluence of territory, sovereignty and state-building in South Asia with the international politics of the Cold War. It deconstructs the idea of international cooperation in the Indus Basin, asking how the framework for accommodating competing Indian and Pakistani demands become discursively framed as “cooperation”, and how the Indus Waters Treaty acquired a positive reputation despite its severe limitations. The chapter analyses an ambitious 1951 plan for unifying Indian and Pakistani management of the Indus system by David E. Lilienthal, a prominent American technocrat. Analysing the plan’s implicit assumptions about scale and the basin’s political geography, it argues that the principle of cooperation was as much a rhetorical device as a real relationship. Even though it helped lure India and Pakistan to the World Bank’s negotiating table, cooperation was quickly abandoned.