Islamabad’s turn toward the Middle East may bring some benefits, but it may also leave it more vulnerable to India.

Pakistan’s expanding strategic footprint in the Middle East received another boost last month when it signed the “Protocol Agreement-2026” with Kuwait, substantially enlarging the framework of military cooperation established by their 2023 Defence Cooperation Agreement. Pakistan pledged to assist Kuwait in training, capacity-building, border management, and other areas of defense cooperation. Coming barely three weeks after Pakistan joined Saudi Arabia and Turkey in the more consequential collective-defense agreement, the Kuwait accord further indicates that Pakistan is assuming a larger security role in the Middle East.  

These developments could provide Pakistan with what might be called strategic depth to its west, and strengthen its diplomatic standing, military partnerships, and potentially its economic resources in ways that could affect the balance of power with its nemesis, India. But another possibility deserves equal consideration: the more Pakistan becomes entangled in the turbulent politics of the Middle East, the more its strategic attention may be diverted from India and the Kashmir border dispute. More importantly, Pakistan’s westward turn could embroil it so deeply in Middle East politics that, instead of being an asset, it could become a liability for Islamabad.  

The Saudi-Turkey-Pakistan agreement signed in Mecca on August 7 is the most striking manifestation of the first possibility. It stipulates that an armed attack on one of the three countries will be regarded as an attack on all. It brings together Saudi financial power, Turkey’s formidable conventional military and defense-industrial capabilities, and Pakistan’s large armed forces and nuclear status. The arrangement is not yet a Middle Eastern NATO. But it represents a significant step towards a security architecture less exclusively dependent upon the United States. 

Pakistan occupies a particularly interesting place in this emerging configuration because it is simultaneously strengthening relations with the Arab Gulf states and retaining sufficient access to Iran to serve as an intermediary between Tehran and Washington. Pakistan’s role in the Iran War has demonstrated this unusual diplomatic versatility. Islamabad has maintained close military and political relations with Saudi Arabia while avoiding identification with the anti-Iran camp. Its relations with Washington have also improved thanks largely to the personal chemistry between President Donald Trump and Field Marshal Asim Munir. At the same time, Pakistan shares a 565-mile border with Iran and has worked to repair relations with Tehran after the extraordinary exchange of cross-border strikes between the two countries in January 2024. 

This positioning enabled Pakistan to emerge as a principal intermediary between Washington and Tehran during the current war. Pakistan hosted direct US-Iran contacts and later worked alongside Qatar and Oman to help end the conflict. These moves underlined how far Pakistan has become a diplomatic bridge between two antagonists with whom it maintains very different but important relationships. 

This is a considerable improvement in Pakistan’s international standing. For much of the past decade, Islamabad appeared diplomatically constrained, economically dependent, and preoccupied with its disputes with Afghanistan and India. Today, Washington, Riyadh, Ankara, Kuwait, and Tehran are courting it simultaneously. 

However, Pakistan’s involvement in the Middle East is not as new as it appears. From its creation, Pakistan sought to combine its South Asian geopolitical identity with an Islamic and Middle Eastern one. Iran was the first country to recognize Pakistan after independence. Pakistan, Iran, and Turkey were subsequently linked through the Western-sponsored Baghdad Pact, later CENTO, and in 1964 created the Regional Cooperation for Development. 

The decisive expansion of Pakistan’s Arab connections came after the 1971 war with India and the loss of East Pakistan (Bangladesh). Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto attempted to compensate for Pakistan’s diminished position in South Asia by emphasizing its identity as a major Muslim power. The Islamic summit held in Lahore in 1974 symbolized this turn towards the Middle East. 

Military cooperation became an especially important instrument of Pakistani influence. During the 1970s, Islamabad concluded military protocols with Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, Oman, and other Arab countries. Pakistani officers trained Gulf armed forces, and Pakistani pilots helped develop some of their air forces. Thousands of Pakistani troops were deployed in Saudi Arabia during the 1970s and 1980s. 

Saudi Arabia became the centerpiece of this relationship. Riyadh provided Pakistan with financial assistance, oil facilities, and political support, while Pakistan contributed military personnel, training, and expertise to Saudi security forces. Their cooperation intensified during the anti-Soviet war in Afghanistan, when Saudi money and Pakistani intelligence capabilities, as well as Pakistan’s role as the conduit for weapons supply to the Afghan insurgents, became essential components of the American-supported campaign against Moscow. 

The relationship survived periodic differences. The most important came in 2015 when Pakistan’s Parliament refused Saudi Arabia’s request to participate in the Yemen war against the Houthis. Islamabad understood that becoming directly involved in a Saudi-Iranian proxy conflict could destabilize Pakistan itself, which has a substantial Shia population. That episode demonstrated an enduring feature of Pakistani policy: close relations with the Arab monarchies combined with a determination to avoid making Iran an enemy. 

The current expansion of Pakistan’s role builds on this tradition. What has changed is its scale. Pakistan is no longer merely supplying trainers and military advisers. The three members of the Mecca Pact have quickly moved to institutionalize it. At a meeting of their defense and foreign ministers and military chiefs in Istanbul on August 31, they decided to set up a secretariat in Saudi Arabia with a Pakistani serving as its first secretary-general for three years. They also agreed to work toward weapons interoperability and to set up joint projects in the defense-industrial sector. 

For India, this development has two contradictory implications. The first is potentially troubling for New Delhi. A Pakistan embedded in an increasingly dense network of Middle Eastern security relationships possesses greater strategic depth than a Pakistan confined diplomatically to South Asia. Accordingly, it can better resist Indian diplomatic and military pressure if necessary.

Turkey has become Pakistan’s most outspoken supporter in the Kashmir dispute and an increasingly important supplier of weapons, including drones, and defense technology. Riyadh has traditionally been more cautious about becoming involved in India-Pakistan disputes, especially as its economic relationship with New Delhi has expanded. But formal defense ties create institutional connections that may acquire significance during a future India-Pakistan crisis. 

There is also the nuclear dimension. Pakistan is the only Muslim-majority state that possesses nuclear weapons. Although speculation about Pakistani nuclear guarantees to Saudi Arabia should be treated cautiously in the absence of clear evidence, Pakistan’s nuclear status, especially in light of nuclear-armed Israel’s aggressive policies in the region, inevitably increases its strategic value to Gulf partners and to Turkey, which increasingly perceives Israel as a strategic rival. The greater that value becomes, the more it adds to Islamabad’s diplomatic leverage elsewhere, including against India. New Delhi therefore cannot assume that Pakistan’s westward expansion is irrelevant to the South Asian balance. 

But the opposite argument is equally plausible. Strategic depth can easily become strategic overstretch. The Middle East is not a region into which outside powers can enter without cost. Pakistan is attempting an extraordinarily difficult balancing act. It is allied with Saudi Arabia, whose principal regional antagonist remains Iran; it is simultaneously mediating between long-time adversaries Iran and the United States. It is developing a strategic partnership with Turkey while maintaining relations with Arab states whose interests do not always coincide with Ankara’s. It is strengthening ties with Gulf monarchies whose security concerns increasingly include confrontations with the Houthis and Iran, precisely the conflicts from which Pakistan has traditionally tried to keep itself insulated. 

The contradictions will become acute when Pakistan’s new defense commitments are tested, as they are beginning to be with the escalation in Saudi-Houthi tensions, with the Houthis blocking the Bab el-Mandeb to Saudi shipping and attacking strategic targets in the south of the kingdom. The Pakistani foreign ministry said Pakistan has no plans to intervene and help the Saudis, even though it is committed to honoring the Mecca Pact. However, the spiraling tensions could spawn a full-fledged war that would put Islamabad in an untenable position, forcing it to choose between Riyadh and Tehran, the Houthis’ principal supporter. 

The more Pakistan gets involved in the Middle Eastern security arena, the harder neutrality becomes. This could work to India’s advantage. Pakistan’s strategic establishment has traditionally concentrated overwhelmingly on India, with Kashmir occupying a central position in its security doctrine. A Pakistan required to devote increasing diplomatic, military and intelligence resources to its western frontier and the Gulf may have less capacity to maintain the same degree of pressure on India. 

Pakistan’s growing footprint in the Middle East undoubtedly enhances its international and regional importance. It may provide Islamabad with additional economic resources, diplomatic leverage and a measure of strategic depth vis-à-vis India. But strategic depth can also become a quagmire since Pakistan is inserting itself into a region containing some of the world’s most combustible rivalries. 

The ultimate outcome will depend upon whether Islamabad succeeds in becoming the Middle East’s indispensable security partner or discovers, as many powers have before it, that involvement in this turbulent region carries obligations and dangers that are easier to acquire than to escape. Current events, especially the escalation in Saudi-Houthi tensions, suggest Islamabad may face this reckoning sooner than it anticipates.  

About the Author: Mohammed Ayoob

​Mohammed Ayoob is a university distinguished professor emeritus of International Relations at Michigan State University. His books include The Many Faces of Political Islam (Second Edition, 2020), Will the Middle East Implode? (2014), and, most recently, From Regional Security to Global IR: An Intellectual Journey (2024). He was also the editor of Assessing the War on Terror (2013).

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