In August an Emirati academic who once advised his country’s president looked at Pakistan and saw only a poor, under-schooled state whose sole qualification was its nuclear arsenal, pushing itself forward to defend a far richer kingdom. Abdulkhaleq Abdulla’s post was meant as mockery. It read more like a confession of unease.
The sneer has a history. In 2015, when our parliament voted to stay out of the Yemen war, Dr Anwar Gargash, then a UAE minister, warned that contradictory positions carry a high cost. Remarks now attributed to him, that Pakistan’s place in the Makkah defence agreement upsets the Gulf’s security balance, belong to the same school of thought. It holds that Pakistani policy should be written wherever Pakistani debt is held.
April tested that theory. With an IMF review looming, Abu Dhabi declined to roll over $3.5 billion in deposits it had renewed for years. The Financial Times reported the reasons as Islamabad’s closeness to Riyadh, its restrained response to Iranian strikes on the Emirates and its effort to mediate between Washington and Tehran.
Pakistan paid. The State Bank returned $3.45 billion on April 23, and a cabinet minister said dignity would not be traded for financial comfort. Saudi Arabia stepped in with $3 billion in fresh deposits and extended another $5 billion. Six months later, reserves stand near $21.5 billion and the IMF has just signed off on its fourth review. The lever was pulled and nothing broke.
Why did Islamabad refuse to bend? Because it would not be recruited against a Muslim neighbour with which it shares a border of roughly 900 kilometres. It hosted Iranian and American delegations and sent its own military leadership to Tehran to keep a ceasefire alive. That is not ambiguity. It is the policy parliament set in 2015: defend the holy places, stay out of other people’s wars.
The Makkah agreement of August 7 is that policy written into a treaty. An attack on Saudi Arabia, Türkiye or Pakistan is an attack on all three. When Houthi drones reached for Makkah and Madinah, the alliance met in Riyadh on October 5 and acted. Its first secretary-general is a Pakistani general. The army’s spokesman has confirmed our troops are in the kingdom, as they have been for decades.
None of this was aimed at Abu Dhabi. The Gulf’s quarrels are its own. Reuters reported in August that Saudi banks were applying extra checks to UAE-bound transfers, a squeeze that businesses traced to the weeks after the Emirates announced its exit from OPEC in April. The Saudi central bank denies any country-specific restriction. Either way, Pakistan did not start that rivalry and should not be blamed for its temperature.
Firmness is not hostility. About 2.2 million Pakistanis earn their living in the Emirates, and trade between us is worth roughly $8 billion a year. The Foreign Office was right in April to warn against attempts to drive a wedge between the two countries. The pact is defensive, Ishaq Dar says more than six states want to join, and the door should stay open to every Muslim capital, Abu Dhabi included.
But the terms have changed. Pakistan will take friendship from anyone and instructions from no one. A country that settled a $3.45 billion bill in a single month and, within six more, was handed the secretariat of a three-nation defence alliance has earned the right to say so.
The views expressed in this article are those of the author and not necessarily those of The Lahore Times.
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