Why Pakistan may be a reluctant ally in Saudis’ Yemen
campaign
Saudi Arabia’s new policy of uniting Sunni Muslim powers against Iran’s
Shia regime has resulted in an impressively broad coalition joining its
military campaign against Yemen’s pro-Tehran Houthi rebels.
Along with five Gulf
countries, and the poorer monarchies of Jordan and Morocco, it also enlisted
the support of itsEgyptian strongman ally,
general-turned-president Abdel Fattah El Sisi. Even plucky Sudan has dispatched
three fighter jets.
Differences over
issues such as the Muslim Brotherhood were suppressed in the interests of
building a broad anti-Iran coalition that extended beyond the Arab world.
Turkey announced on Thursday that it supports the Saudi-led offensive, with
President Recep Tayyep Erdogan issuing a spirited harangue that
branded Iran’s actions a source of “annoyance.”
But perhaps the
biggest surprise has been the reported inclusion of Pakistan. Al-Arabiya, the Saudi-owned broadcaster, said
Islamabad was providing military support. The habitually evasive Pakistani
Foreign Office said simply that they were mulling a Saudi request for troops,
while Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif vowed Thursday
to retaliate against any threat to Saudi Arabia’s "integrity."
A senior member of
Sharif’s cabinet told Al Jazeera that Pakistan will not be involved in any
action “in Yemen” itself but will provide support to the Saudis on their own
soil “if they are threatened.” On Wednesday, the Wall Street Journal reported Pakistani
and Saudi forces were carrying out a joint exercise near the Yemeni border, and
quoted a U.S. official as saying the move was designed to serve as a warning to
the Houthi rebels.
Unlike the Turks, who
are incensed by Tehran’s involvement in propping up the regime of Syria’s
President Bashar al-Assad, Pakistan has no active dispute with Iran. The Saudis
and Turks have made common cause in Syria and now Yemen despite backing rival
factions in Tunisia, Libya and Egypt.
Pakistan, by
contrast, has remained distant from the Syrian conflict, facing a compelling
threat at home. Since the December massacre of Peshawar schoolchildren, it has
renewed its resolve to eliminate the Pakistani Taliban — a notoriously
sectarian organization that has terrorized Pakistan’s Shia
population, the largest outside Iran. Around one in five Pakistanis
is Shia, as was the country’s founder, Mohammed Ali Jinnah. Still, it now finds
itself drawn into a geopolitical alliance with a strongly sectarian pallor.
This isn’t first time
Pakistan has been dragged into the poisonous Saudi-Iranian rivalry. After the
1979 revolution that brought the Ayatollahs to power, Pakistan became a
battlefield in a proxy war between the two countries. The Iranians established
armed Shia groups in Pakistan; the Saudis countered by sponsoring anti-Shia
groups — a tradition that continues to this day, with millions of dollars funneled from
the desert kingdom into thousands of Pakistani madrassas teaching extreme ideas.
For the Saudis, the
appeal of Pakistan is obvious. It shares a border with Iran and, crucially,
already has nuclear weapons. The Saudis want Pakistan to act as a counterweight
to Iran, and have long cultivated a close relationship with its military. Since
the late 1960s, Pakistani soldiers have been permanently garrisoned in Saudi
Arabia. In 1969, Pakistani pilots slipped into Saudi jets to carry out sorties
in South Yemen against a rebel threat at the time.
For Pakistan, Saudi
Arabia is not only a long-standing source of aid but a principal source of
foreign exchange through much-needed remittances.
Just last month, for example, $453 million flowed into Pakistan from the
exertions of more than 1.5 million often poorly treated migrant workers. The
intimacy of the two countries’ ruling elites notwithstanding, the migrant
workers are weighed down by debts they owe to exploitative recruiters.
Pakistanis are also disproportionately found in Saudi Arabia’s jails and on
death row.
The relationship,
however, is one-sided. “We in Saudi Arabia are not observers in Pakistan, we
are participants,” Saudi Arabia’s current ambassador in Washington, Adel
al-Jubeir, boasted in 2007, according to a leaked State Department cable. Its clout
extends to the realm of politics, where the Saudis have keenly backed military
rulers and right-wing politicians — Prime Minister Sharif lived in exile in
Jeddah after the Kingdom persuaded then dictator Pervez Musharraf to release
him from prison.
As Prince Waleed ibn
Talal once told to the Wall Street Journal,
“Nawaz Sharif, specifically, is very much Saudi Arabia’s man in Pakistan.” The Saudis last year injected $1.5
billion into Pakistan’s treasury, boosting its liquidity at moment
when it is still strapped to an exacting IMF loan package.
Sharif’s Pakistan
Muslim League-Nawaz party is seen within Pakistan to favor Sunnis, and as
having ties with sectarian groups. It has few Shia parliamentarians and few
Shia voters.
Pakistan’s army,
however, has never had a sectarian reputation. It has included many Shia
generals, although their numbers have thinned over the years. Some of the worst
victims of the Pakistani Taliban’s savagery were Shia soldiers, who were
murdered in captivity. Becoming an overtly Sunni army would compromise the
Pakistan military’s proud claim of being a force of cohesion for the country,
and risk alienating many Shia Pakistanis, at a time when there is a clamor for
unity against the Taliban at home.
This may also be a
bad time for Pakistan to pick a fight with Iran. In recent years, relations
between the neighbors have veered between periods of economic cooperation and
cross-border tensions, particularly over Sunni armed groups targeting the
Iranian regime from Pakistani territory in Balochistan.
But as it battles the
Pakistani Taliban along the Afghan border, Islamabad is trying to facilitate a
postwar settlement across the border by bringing to bear its considerable influence over the
Afghan Taliban. Ashraf Ghani, the Afghan president, has developed
closer relations with the Pakistani leadership than his predecessor, Hamid
Karzai, had ever managed to achieve. But any eventual settlement in Afghanistan
will inevitably involve Iran, whose influence in the country was such that even
the U.S. sought Tehran’s cooperation during and after its 2001 invasion to
topple the Taliban.
Being drawn into the
Middle East’s sectarian battles, then, carries greater domestic and regional
risk for Pakistan than it does for most of the Saudis’ other partners.
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