How Pakistan has got itself entangled in the Middle East |
Pakistan has a knack for arriving at the wrong place at precisely the wrong time. When Russia attacked Ukraine in February 2022, its then prime minister, Imran Khan, was seated in the Kremlin, smiling and shaking hands for cameras. And when Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, Islamabad’s most important Middle Eastern patrons, found themselves at odds over Yemen last week, it was once again caught in the crossfire. This time Emirati President Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan was on his hunting trip to Pakistan. These moments are not mere coincidences but rather symptoms of a deeper strategic malaise of a military-dominated foreign policy that repeatedly entangles Pakistan in conflicts it neither controls nor fully understands.
Over the past decade, Pakistan has drifted from being a peripheral player in the Middle East to an increasingly exposed one. As the shift has been shaped by transactional military diplomacy as signified by recent Strategic Mutual Defence Agreement with Saudi Arabia, the result is a country wedged uncomfortably between rival power centers with China and the United States on one axis globally, and Saudi Arabia and the UAE on another at the regional level. While each of its allies expects loyalty, no one offers insulation when loyalties collide.
That collision is now visible in Yemen and most likely in Libya. On December 30, Riyadh announced that it targeted a weapons shipment at Yemen’s Mukalla port, claiming the arms originated from the Emirati port of Fujairah. Riyadh alleged that weapons were destined for the Southern Transitional Council (STC), a UAE-backed separatist group seeking to carve out an independent state in southern Yemen.
It made Pakistan to tread an uncomfortable line. Though Islamabad expressed “complete solidarity” with Saudi Arabia, reaffirming its support for the kingdom’s sovereignty and Yemen’s territorial integrity, what........