What Do We Do When Tested by Friends?
By Karamatullah K. Ghori
Toronto, Canada
There was a time, back in the 1980s, when we were tested as never before by our closest friend and—in some ways—mentor, Saudi Arabia.
Every government in Pakistan has since professed an abiding commitment to the inviolability of Saudi Arabia as a cornerstone of our foreign policy. But that period, of the 1980s, was of particular closeness—in more senses than one—to the Saudi monarchy because of General Ziaul Haq at the helm of Pakistan. Zia had the reputation of being a bosom friend of the Saudis; his attachment to the House of Saud was beyond any shade of doubt.
The Saudis knew better than anybody else how committed their ‘brother’ Zia was to them, their interests and their concerns. They had been given a sterling evidence of Zia’s fidelity to them when, on the heels of the 1979 incursion into the Haram-e-Kaaba by Wahabi hotheads and radicals, he’d readily endorsed their request that two brigades of the Pakistan Army be stationed on the Saudi soil for the protection of the royals.
The Saudis had Saddam Hussain of Iraq on board as well; or, rather, they had hitched their wagon to Saddam’s grossly miscalculated adventure against Iran’s nascent Islamic Revolution. Over-indulgence in generosity was the name of the game for the Saudis to have given virtually a blank check to Saddam to invade Iran.
But when the Iranians—after initially reeling under the impact of Saddam’s massive military incursion into their land—hit back Saddam cried uncle and sought not just more petro-dollars but military muscles too from his Saudi mentors.
That put the Saudi royals into a pickle. They were ready to open up their bulging purse-strings wider than before but fighting a war wasn’t their cup of tea. So they asked their Pakistani protégé and minion, Zia, to chip in with his men-power. They wanted to deploy their two Pakistani guest-brigades on the side of Saddam to bail him out of the tight corner where his ill-adventure had painted him.
The Saudis must have been knocked out of their wits when Zia gave a flat no to their ‘request.’ He may’ve had the rightly or wrongly earned reputation of being ‘their man’ but he was first and foremost the leader of Pakistan. Giving primacy to Pakistan’s national interest was an obligation higher than whatever soft corner he may’ve had for the Saudis. He was willing to pay the price in Saudi wrath for his temerity but knew exactly what he was supposed to do: stand firm on safeguarding Pakistan’s interest and refuse to bargain on his conviction that Pakistani soldiers weren’t mercenaries.
It isn’t fashionable in Pakistan to quote Zia as a role-model. However, the incumbent civil and military leaders of Pakistan will be doing themselves an immense service, as well as the people of Pakistan, by remembering the paradigm Zia—otherwise a Saudi aficionado—set in the teeth of a situation which has come back to test Pakistan and its leaders in a new calling.
The Saudis obviously didn’t draw any intelligent lesson from the Zia paradigm. Or it could be that, in their clouded perception, they have a more redoubtable minion than Zia in their current Pakistani protégé, Nawaz Sharif. And the other Sharif on the Pakistani firmament, General Raheel, couldn’t be far behind Nawaz in this calling, if the frequency of the general’s visits to the Custodians of the Two Holiest Places of Islam is any guide.
Armed with that knowledge, perhaps, the Saudis first tried to rope us into their own ill-advised and ill-thought-out adventure in Yemen. Like Saddam against Iran they may be guilty of over-estimating their prowess and under-estimating the Yemeni resolve to resist the invader. And they may have estimated that Pakistani military muscles, in reserve, or actual boots on ground, would be a good insurance against the Yemenis doing to them what the Iranians did to Saddam.
That our military leadership—but not necessarily our elected leaders, too—refused to swallow the bait on Yemen was reassuring to those who had Zia’s legacy in a similar situation in mind.
But it seems the Saudis don’t believe in taking ‘no’ for an answer. So testing Pakistan has acquired the panache of a favorite Saudi sport. Putting an old friend on the knife’s edge seems to be the Saudi way of measuring the resilience of their formidable ties with Pakistan.
Riyadh had the audacity of naming Pakistan as a key component of the latest ‘surprise’ sprung on us. The announcement that Pakistan was also a member of the 34-nation, so-called Islamic Alliance to fight the chimera of terrorism caught our Foreign Office Mandarins and Brahmins completely off-guard. They dismissed it as a bad joke. But the very next day the poor FO factotums were made to look as helpless and clueless as the man on the street when they meekly admitted that Pakistan was on board the latest Saudi bandwagon.
It’s no riddle that the political and military leaders had given an undertaking to their Saudi mentors and deemed it unnecessary to share it with the FO—whose glorified babus are, in any case, used to taking such rebuffs in their stride while putting on a bold and unruffled demeanor.
But that wasn’t the end of the surprise; the Saudis are apparently inclined to be relentless in their testing of Pakistan to see how far we may be prepared to go to measure up to the royal expectations as proof of our fidelity and fealty to them.
The latest, cruel and insensitive, Saudi salvo of beheading Sheikh Nimer Al-Nimer—a Shiite cleric of charisma who had acquired an iconic appeal for his followers across a vast swathe of the Shiite world—has been roundly condemned by so many for its apparent barbarity. It has enraged Iran and precipitated a diplomatic crisis of ugly portents. However, the fallout from this grisly episode puts Pakistan to an instant test.
Reason and past precedent says Pakistan should steer clear of taking any partisan position in this row between two combatants each one of whom happens to have a special status in our regional and over-arching Muslim calculus. Given the delicacy and sensitivity of our relations with both Iran and Saudi Arabia it would be an extremely unsavory development for us in Pakistan if we were even remotely seen to be tilting in favor of either of the two.
It’s not only that common sense dictates to us not to tilt this or that way between the two, because that would be proof of our being naïve in foreign affairs. But much more than our concern for correctness of posture and policy in terms of foreign relations, our domestic constraints are such that taking sides would be tantamount to virtual Harakiri.
We have been straining at all the windmills for well over a year to banish the demons of terrorism from our soil. The task is still undone and far from over. Our military efforts have cleansed our urban areas a great deal of the menace of terrorism. But the overall scenario on the terrorism front is still fragile and susceptible to a quick upsurge if the applecart arranged by the anti-terrorism campaign were to be disturbed. We are still on thin ice, so to speak and must tip-toe around very, very, gingerly.
That’s where the government could land itself into trouble if the sectarian equilibrium between the majority Sunnis and minority Shiites of Pakistan were disturbed by any real or perceived tilt in favor of Saudi Arabia. The sectarian fault lines in Pakistan run deep and disturbing them could spell disaster on our home front.
Why Saudi Arabia is no brain-teaser or riddle. Our civil and military leaders are on record for proclaiming from their house tops—nauseatingly at times—that they will not allow Saudi Arabia to get under harm’s way and will ensure its integrity and security at all cost. There’s no such commitment ever given or insinuated as far as Iran is concerned although we share a long common border with Iran and any trouble there would spill on to our side as well, whether we liked it or not.
The Saudis could easily put us up to the litmus test of guaranteeing their security by picking up a bloody quarrel with Iran the way Saddam did. On top of it, we have lately shackled ourselves—like one committing a crime while sleep-walking—to the so-called Islamic Alliance without knowing much about this hare pulled out of their hat by our Saudi friends. Many of the ‘allies’ in this Saudi-cobbled contraption—such as Benin, Gabon, Uganda et al.—don’t even have a Muslim majority in their population mix.
Unwittingly, no doubt, we seem to have bitten more than we could chew, thanks, largely, to an over-dose of friendship and camaraderie tentatively put on display by our media-savvy leaders with their old habit of not straining their mental faculties more than absolutely necessary. A course-correction is badly called for in such a bind. Dithering on it would be costly and spell disaster for the country. We may be prisoners of our geography but imaginative policies can still bail us out of trouble.
