A Rush to Impale Pakistan on the Saudi Petard
By Karamatullah K. Ghori
Canada

It’s not only savvy sages and pundits that have been pontificating that our foreign policy has reached a dead end. Even the man on the street can see that it’s so: our foreign policy is marooned in a cul de sac.
Our relations with India are more hopeless than ever before. Of course with a vengeful and myopic Modi at the helm in India the prospects for improvement were always virtually zero. But our own security establishment, with its own lock on relations with India, isn’t inclined either to give up its tried and found-wanting paradigm. The poor Foreign Office mandarins have, at best, been reduced to unabashed apologists of finessing the appalling failures of the archaic paradigm.
Modi, on his part, seems intent on heaping injury over insult. He’s pursuing, intently, a policy of making inroads into the sanctum of Pakistan’s traditional friends. He has been honored by the Saudis with open arms. He was the pampered guest at the recent inauguration of the first Hindu temple on the Arabian Peninsula, in Dubai, since the dawn of Islam.
Relations with Kabul have been in a free fall for so long that the less said about them the better. Sophists would argue that President Ashraf Ghani is a pitiful stooge of both Washington and Delhi. True. But have we seriously made any attempt to throw him a line that he may hang on to and dig himself—and the wretched country he leads—out of the pit?
Worst of all, relations with our perceived ‘ally’ of more than six decades—the world’s only super-power, have, for a long time, been marked with more holes than there are in Swiss cheese. Washington is now threatening to slap sanctions of its choice on us in collusion with other anti-Pakistan countries, including the arch colonialist UK.
But as if all these problems didn’t exist for us, or didn’t matter all that much, we seem to be rushing, with eyes blind-folded, into yet another easily avoidable abyss. Egged on by god knows what, or whom, we are seemingly getting desperate to hang ourselves, not on our own petard but that of the Saudis.
An announcement by ISPR (Inter-Services Public Relations) last Thursday, February 15, took all and sundry by surprise. It said Pakistan had decided to beef up its military footprints on the holy soil of Saudi Arabia, where a thousand, or more, men in our uniform have long been stationed to partake of Saudi hospitality and train their soldiers.
What would be the strength of the fresh contingent of our men in uniform to be sent to Saudi Arabia? The laconic answer to this query was that it would be less than a division. Well, a division has, at the very least, 12,000 men. It could be one short of 12,000 or a hundred less than 12,000. But, suffice to say, it would be thousands of our soldiers going to the call of our great brothers-in-faith to the land all Pakistanis hanker to visit at least once in their life.
The ISPR spokesman tried hard to finesse the issue of concern felt by so many in Pakistan at all levels of opinion. Why so many soldiers are being sent to the Saudis? If the present contingent of a thousand troops there was good enough to train their Saudi counter-parts up to this point what has prompted the beefing of ranks so exponentially? Have the Saudi armed forces embarked on an expansion mission to the extent where a whole division, minus a few, would be needed to train the new recruits?
The nuanced explanation for fresh troops is that they will only impart “training and advice” to the Saudis. ‘Advice’ at such a level, to so few by so many! Hard to stomach; could only result in indigestion.
The surprise and shock, felt across the country by the enlightened as well as by the not-so-enlightened is informed by what Senator Farhatullah Babar eloquently articulated as a move, from our defense establishment, which is “tantamount to bypassing the Parliament.”
Yes, it seems calculated, on the face of it, to undercut whatever authority the parliament has left to its not-so-edifying roster, which has more appalling failures than achievements.
Even those with a short memory will have no trouble in recalling that it was only three years that the Parliament had passed a unanimous resolution, in a joint-sitting of both Houses, forbidding the government from responding to the Saudi cry for military support to abet its adventure of arrogance invading a dirt-poor and hapless Yemen. Nawaz was desperate to respond favorably to his Saudi mentors. But even the military high command under General Raheel Sharif wasn’t keen to get its hands burnt in the Yemeni fireplace.
It’s obvious, however, that the Saudis didn’t give up. They chiseled away at Pakistan’s resistance relentlessly.
Their ploy to rope in Raheel Sharif into their contraption of the so-called Islamic Military Counter-terrorism Coalition (IMCTC) worked handsomely. GOP gladly fell into the trap, eyes wide-open, when it concurred in General Sharif’s appointment as the first head of IMCTC. After commanding one of the smartest armies in the world, General Raheel Sharif now heads an army which, so far, is only on paper.
The latest development clearly marks that the Saudis, under their new ‘strongman,’ or overly ambitious ‘strong young-man,’ Prince Muhammad bin Salman (MbS), have charmed Raheel’s successor at the head of Pakistan Army, the current chief General Qamar Bajwa, too.
Two weeks before the surprise February 15 ISPR bombshell of news hit the national scene, General Bajwa had paid a quiet visit to Riyadh where he was closeted with MbS. This was his second visit to the Kingdom in two months. It doesn’t take a genius to connect the dots on this not-too-macabre episode of the world’s sole Islamic nuclear power succumbing to not-so-subtle Saudi pressure. The ISPR bolt from the blue came on the heels of General Bajwa’s meeting with the Saudi ambassador to Islamabad.
The Pakistani Parliamentarian have good reason to be incensed; the GHQ has, no doubt, scoffed at their privilege and disdained them by not taking them into confidence. But the parliamentarians have themselves to blame for having lowered themselves into the eyes of the whole nation, not just the GHQ bigwigs, when they elected a Supreme Court-disqualified Nawaz Sharif to lead the ruling party despite his handicap.
For those among the arm-chair intellectuals who have made it that staple in trade to denounce the military establishment as the font of all that’s wrong in Pakistan’s governance, a word of caution should suffice. GHQ may have shunned the Parliament and brushed aside its 2015 objections to rush to Saudi Arabia’s help.
However, it’s implausible that the military establishment decided to swallow the Saudi bait all by itself without a helpful nod from the civilian government. The ongoing sham of a government in Islamabad is Nawaz-lite. What Nawaz couldn’t do on his watch, when he was in command upfront, he has pulled it off with his colorless minion, KhaqanAbbasi, upfront. GHQ couldn’t have taken the plunge all by itself into the cesspool created by the Saudi misadventure in Yemen without the Nawaz-puppets on board.
What’s regrettable is the military establishment’s undisguised effort to pull wool over the eyes of everyone in Pakistan who may have felt appalled by this abject surrender to the Saudi whims. They seem to be taking everyone’s basic intelligence for granted.
ISPR says, innocuously, that the Pakistani troops wouldn’t be “employed outside KSA.” Alright; we don’t disagree that they wouldn’t be “employed” outside the kingdom. But what about their possible deployment outside the Kingdom! There’s a world of difference between employment and deployment; isn’t it?
Now that the die has been cast in Saudi Arabia’s favor in Islamabad we have to ask the obvious question: is it in Pakistan’s interest, short and long-term interests, to go out on a limb for the sake of our Saudi ‘brethren’? Have we fore-thought the fallout from this move and are we ready to deal with its ramifications?
Even a novice in foreign affairs knows that Saudi foreign policy has long been Iran-centric. Everything the Saudis have done, even long before they got sucked into the Yemeni quagmire, smacks of their paranoia with Iran and its perceived influence, not just in Yemen but in the Levant, too.
The Saudis rushed, blindly, to punish Yemen because they were enraged by the shenanigans of the Houthis whom they have long suspected, because of their sectarian beliefs, of acting as proxies for Iran. Their increasingly sorry-looking plunge into Yemen was prompted by an ineluctable urge to pre-empt further inroads by Iran into the Arabian Peninsula.
That should be our primary concern in Pakistan, now that the civil and military establishment has chosen to stand by the Saudis. Our policy makers, casting our lot with a Saudi establishment that has Iran so much in its focus that it’s not even shy of getting into bed with the Zionists to harm Iran, have their work cut out.
If only they were to realize the gravity of their decision to become virtual partners in the budding Saudi-Israeli camaraderie against Iran, our policy makers and leaders should strain themselves to ensure that Pakistan should stay a healthy distance away from any Saudi-Israeli plans to entangle us against Iran.
It’s redeeming that General Bajwa seems alive to the task ahead of him, now that the military establishment has crossed the red line drawn by the Parliament three years ago.
Earlier in the week before giving in to the Saudi pressure, Bajwa had reportedly visited Doha, Qatar, secretly, where he met with the Qatari Emir, Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad al-Thani. The Saudis have also been at loggerheads with Qatar in a dispute since last June entirely triggered by their arrogance to teach tiny Qatar a lesson. Qatar is guilty, in the Saudi eyes, of being friendly to Iran and cooperating with it in exploiting gas reserves in the waters of the Gulf.
Later in Islamabad, Bajwa had a meeting with Turkish and Iranian ambassadors. It can be presumed that he took both these traditional friends of Pakistan into confidence on the move he was about to make and put their concerns to rest.
The bottom line on this unexpected—because of the Parliament’s categorical edict against it—development is that Pakistan has conjured up a crisis of confidence for itself out of thin air, virtually. There are too many imponderables ahead that our policy makers may not have taken into account at this juncture. But the road ahead has many a traps to throw us off balance if not plunge us into an abyss from which we may find hard to retrace our foot steps.
A prayer or two for the safety of our deliberate or inadvertent plunge into untested waters may well be in order.

- K_K_ghori@hotmail.com
(The author is a former ambassador and career diplomat)