Well, if you dig deep enough holes, they will. That's how over a million people live in the Rajasthan desert in India.
Following permaculture principles, you can transform a region from barren (where water evaporates and leaves your area) to a relative oasis. There are several current desert permaculture projects that illustrate this. We just need to start doing this on a large scale - at least within and around regions of population. Then much more of the pumped water will remain in the local system. As a bonus, local climates will be cooler on average. And you can grow a lot of food, if you choose to.
In the context of the GP comment, isn't that entirely dependent on how deep your holes are? By definition, if you dig holes "deep enough", then you won't run out of water. And they are providing a concrete example of somewhere that they do dig holes deep enough to not run out of water (though I'm not sure how constrained the population growth is there).