The Strategic Mutual Defence Agreement signed between Saudi Arabia and Pakistan at Riyadh on September 17 is to be seen in the backdrop of the conflict scenario that had developed in the Middle East.
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NEW DELHI — The Strategic Mutual Defence Agreement signed between Saudi Arabia and Pakistan at Riyadh on September 17 is to be seen in the backdrop of the conflict scenario that had developed in the Middle East- it does not in any way indicate a dilution of the strong friendship of Saudi Arabia with India.
The pact is being seen by some strategic analysts as a kind of Islamic NATO primarily because there is a provision in the agreement saying that ‘any aggression against either country shall be considered as an act of aggression against both’ which echoed the ‘collective defence’ clause of the original NATO pact of 1949. It is known that for long years, Pakistan, an active member of the Organisation of Islamic Conference (OIC), had been looked upon by Saudi Arabia, which enjoyed the traditional Chairmanship of OIC, as the principal source of Army support for any defence needs of Saudis.
It may be recalled that a major occasion had arisen for this in 1979 when a large group of Islamic radicals made an attack on the Grand Mosque housing the Kaaba to protest against the claim of the Saudi monarchy that it was the custodian of the Holy cities of Mecca and Medina, and Pakistan had to rush its army to rescue the Mosque and disperse the attackers.
Nearly 20,000 Pakistani troops were stationed in Saudi Arabia in the following years. There is certainly an angle of the protection of the ‘Ummah’ that Pakistan had been keen to contribute to, right from the days of the presidency of Gen. Ziaul Haq. Coinage of the word ‘Islamic NATO’ was not without logic in view of the willingness of Pakistan to play the role of a ‘defender of faith’ on the OIC platform.
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The ground work for the Saudi-Pakistan pact, however, has been laid by the recent developments in the Middle East-more specifically the military confrontation between Israel and Iran, with the two countries inducing larger geopolitical alignments that were completely opposed to each other. Iran, a fundamentalist Shiite country, was ideologically opposed to the US, and it had mobilised the support of not only Shiite proxies like Lebanon-based Hizbollah and Yemen-based Houthis, but what is far more significant, taken Hamas, the Sunni radical force, in its embrace.
After the October 7 terror attack of Hamas on Israel in 2023, in which some 1200 Israelis were killed and 250, including women and children, were taken away as hostages by the attackers, Israel launched a full-scale retaliatory action by Israel Defence Forces (IDF) in Gaza and elsewhere to ‘finish off’ the terror group. President Donald Trump totally backed Israel, asking the latter to ‘clean up’ Gaza in a quick time.
As Iran joined in militarily on the side of Hamas and the US intervened against Iran, President Trump ordered the use of bunker-buster bombs on the nuclear facilities of Iran to compel the latter to ‘surrender’ on the issue of a new US-Iran nuclear pact.
Israel looked upon a nuclear Iran as an existential threat and attacked the Uranium-enrichment plants of Iran before the US also stepped in to bomb these facilities. A disquieting feature of the Iran-Israel conflict was that it got deepened as a potential ‘clash of civilisations’ between Islam and Zionism. Moreover, because of political reasons, China and Russia gravitated towards Iran, and this created a scenario where signs of revival of the Cold War could be seen on the horizon.
Saudi Arabia has been a close ally of the US, but it did not want the situation in the Middle East to deteriorate beyond a point because of the Iran-Israel military confrontation. Its defence pact with Pakistan is a move for safeguarding its own security in a clash that world powers brought to the Middle East.
Pakistan would like to maintain its close friendship with the Saudis, and it knows that the agreement does not disturb its own relationships with the US or China.
Pakistan followed a clever policy of pretending to be a helper in the negotiations between the US and Taliban at Doha to facilitate the Biden Administration’s plans of withdrawing American troops from Afghanistan in 2020. Since then, it has remained in the good books of Islamic radical forces, allowed radical outfits to be fostered on its own soil, and worked for inducting the latter in cross-border terrorism against India in Kashmir.
The Pak-Saudi pact was evidently hastened by a missile attack by Israel on a residential compound in Doha on September 8, which was meant to target Hamas leaders who had assembled there in pursuance of the initiative of Qatar US ally, to follow up on the Trump administration’s recent push for a ceasefire in Gaza. Six people were reportedly killed, but the Hamas leaders survived. Israel claimed that this was a retaliatory action to avenge a shooting in Jerusalem a day earlier that was carried out by Hamas and in which six Israelis were killed and some others were injured. Israel Defence Forces (IDF) Chief of Staff declared that ‘we are operating across the entire Middle East so that Hamas will have no place to hide from us’.
Israel was clearly prioritising Hamas’s total defeat over a ceasefire in Gaza-evidently within the knowledge of the US. This Gaza-related matter, together with the Iran-Israel military confrontation, was setting an environment in which friends of the US, like Saudi Arabia, were seeking to diversify arrangements for their own national security.
Saudi Arabia would not like to do any thing that disturbed its friendship with India but Pakistan would certainly jump at the prospect of joining a defence pact with Saudi Arabia as it might bring in huge Saudi investment in Pakistan and strengthen Pakistan’s position against India through a possible diversion of American military resources to Pakistan and a widening of support of Muslim countries for Pakistan in a situation of conflict with India. OIC has already come to notice for supporting the Pak case on Kashmir and favouring Indo-Pak talks on the ‘dispute’. New Delhi’s relations with Riyadh, however, are independent of the latter’s links with Islamabad and underlined by historical, economic, and Indian diaspora -related factors. The initial response of India’s external affairs ministry that it expects Riyadh to take into account ‘mutual interests and sensitivities’ seemed appropriate.
The concerns of India over the Strategic Defence pact between Pakistan and Saudi Arabia relate to the advantage Pakistan had in mobilising the support of the Islamic world on Kashmir, the fact of Sino-Pak strategic alliance working against India and the indications from the Trump Presidency that US was counting on trade with Pakistan notwithstanding the denouncement of Islamic terrorism in no uncertain terms by Donald Trump himself.
In recent times, the pro-Pak pronouncements of the OIC have become stronger in spite of the hold of Saudi Arabia on this 57-member block. Addressing the Ministerial meeting of OIC Contact Group on Jammu & Kashmir held on March 16, 2023, on the sidelines of the 49th session of OIC Foreign Ministers at Nouakchott, Islamic Republic of Mauritania, the Secretary General of OIC affirmed OIC’s continued support to the people of J&K in realising their right to ‘self-determination’. Following the horrific Pak-directed terror attack at Pahalgam and the Indo-Pak tensions created by it, OIC made a shocking statement accusing India of making ‘unfounded allegations’ against Pakistan.
In the post-Pahalgam military confrontation between India and Pakistan, China gave direct military and technological assistance to Pakistan, pushing China’s hostility against India to a new level. The claim of President Donald Trump that he had intervened to bring about a ‘ceasefire’ between the two nuclear powers was used by the Pak Army Chief to come closer to Donald Trump by calling for Nobel Peace Prize for the US President whereas India’s position was that it agreed to accept the ceasefire on the request of Pak DGMO. Pakistan has successfully tried to keep the US geopolitically on its side even as President Trump later pushed back from his suggestion that he was willing to assist India-Pakistan negotiations on Kashmir and clarified that he was not for ‘third-party mediation’ on the issue.
As already mentioned, India has no fears about its relationship with Saudi Arabia following the Saudi-Pak Strategic Defence pact, but has to take due notice of its implications for India in regard to Indo-Pak relations. Pakistan will continue to instigate faith-based militancy in J&K- Pak ISI had a hand in ousting Kashmiri Pandits from Kashmir in the 1990s to strengthen Pak claim on the Muslim predominant valley on communal lines. It continues to play this card by recruiting terrorists by indoctrinating the youth on Jehad and using social media for raising ‘sleeper cells’ in the valley. The fact that the situation in the Middle East is getting worse because of a drift towards religion-based conflicts in the region is certainly adding to the challenge for India, even as Pakistan would not be too bothered by it.
While India must continue to condemn faith-based terrorism from all international platforms, it should encourage democratisation, particularly in the Arab states of the Middle East run on a fundamentalist base. Indo-US relations must uphold the line that they represented the natural friendship between the two largest and tested democracies of the world, notwithstanding the transactional character of some of Donald Trump’s pronouncements. While trade and visa issues can be subjected to negotiations, India should not hesitate to draw a red line and assert its sovereign autonomy against the US on matters of national interest whenever this becomes necessary.
(The writer is a former Director Intelligence Bureau)