Thenews.com.pk

Ayaz Amir
Tuesday, April 07, 2015
From Print Edition

Islamabad diary

The hypocrisy and the charade on parade would stick in throats more capacious than ours. The defence of the Holy Mosques is every Muslim’s sacred duty, we are breathlessly informed. But who is threatening the Holy Mosques? Certainly not the Houthis of Yemen who are being attacked by Saudi warplanes. It is they who are the victims of aggression, not our Saudi friends. But for obvious reasons, we can’t bring ourselves to say this.

Item number two in the list of frothy declamations: any threat to Saudi Arabia’s territorial integrity will elicit a forceful Pakistani response. But where is the threat to this integrity? Who is planning to attack Saudi Arabia?

Of course Pakistan – the world’s original Islamic Republic, plus in its more charged moments, the Fortress of Islam – faces a dilemma. Its heart and its emotions are in one place, its mind – when it chooses to work – in another. Pakistan knows the risks involved in committing troops to Saudi Arabia’s uncertain adventure. So it is not saying an open yes. But for fear of upsetting the Saudis, for whom this is a matter of life and death, it cannot bring itself to say no.

Yemen may turn into a nightmare for the Saudis in the days to come but it is already a minor nightmare for Pakistan, especially its military, which is being called upon to choose between the devil and the sea.

There is a third fabrication, that this is somehow a Sunni-Shia war. It is not. The Houthis are Zaydi Shias, whatever that means. But their allies, troops loyal to the former strongman, Ali Abdullah Saleh, are Sunnis. Where does this leave the sectarian divide?

As George Galloway, the thorn in many a sensitive skin, points out in a diatribe which you can access on YouTube, the people of Gaza are all Sunnis. But when the Israelis were slaughtering them last year, the great House of Saud lifted not a finger to stop the Israeli aggression. So much for the defence of Sunni Islam.

The issue in Yemen is altogether different. It is about influence and control, about Saudi Arabia being able to control the affairs of its impoverished and conflict-racked neighbour. The Houthis are trying to right ancient wrongs. They do not fit into the Saudi scheme of things because their uprising and bid for power set a bad example for Saudi Arabia’s own restive Shia population which is concentrated, unluckily, in Saudi Arabia’s oil-producing regions.

The Saudis were concerned about the Shia uprising in Bahrain for the same reason. It was setting a bad example. So they sent their troops into Bahrain to quell the unrest.

As we all know, retired Pakistani defence personnel are a vital component of Bahrain’s security forces. Shorn of rhetoric and doublespeak, the Saudis want Pakistan to play a similar role in Yemen. What they are seeking, and demanding, are not sentries to stand guard at the gates of the Holy Mosques, but an expeditionary force to help turn the tide against the Houthis and their allies.

The funny thing is that despite being the fourth highest defence spenders on the planet – after the United States, China and Russia – Saudi Arabia is still unable to defend itself or, as we are seeing in Yemen, sustain a war of aggression on its own. Hence the looking to Pakistan to fill this need.

Going by the contours of their chequebook diplomacy, however, the Saudis should really have made the first request for troops to Field Marshal El-Sisi of Egypt. They’ve given him much bigger largesse than anything given to Pakistan – 5 billion dollars President Mohamed Morsi was deposed, and a 12 billion dollars package, along with other Gulf contributors, pledged recently. But the field marshal has announced sending four warships, that’s all, which, come to think of it, is smart thinking. More