The Middle East is on fire and many countries, including Saudi Arabia, are being hit by Iran. One thing revealed in this situation is how spineless ally Pakistan can be.
Pakistan made promise to Saudi Arabia to sell the Saudi-Pakistan SMDA as strategic security insurance, and now when Saudi needs Pakistan for its defence, Pakistan avoids.
The pact was said to be a NATO like agreement of the Middle East, and it included “aggression against one would be treated as aggression against both.”
But after the February 28 US-Israeli attack on Iran and Tehran’s strikes on Gulf states, Pakistan has offered zero military commitment of the kind such a pact seemed to imply.
Instead, Islamabad is now hiding behind an Afghanistan front that it has itself helped intensify for destruction from its commitment to Saudi Arabia. Pakistan has escalated strikes across the border, and the fighting has already displaced more than 115,000 people in Afghanistan.
Pakistan designed this conflict, and now it is giving them the perfect excuse to say they are tied down next with their own conflict next door, and they are unavailable abroad for Saudi.
It seems Pakistan did not predict that Saudi would be caught in crisis this badly, this soon.
And like a lazy, one-sided alliance, Pakistan had predicted it would be them who would be receiving the prestige of being rich Saudi’s security partner. Now when it is the other partner needing Pakistan, by seeing that the partnership is demanding actual cost from its side, Pakistan pivoted.
And Saudi Arabia is clearly disappointed. From Riyadh’s point of view, Pakistan sold this pact as something historic, serious, and strategic. But now that the moment of testing has arrived, Pakistan is nowhere to be seen.
Saudi is learning, in real time, that what Pakistan marketed as brotherhood and mutual defence was in fact a hollow and one sided arrangement.
