By Ankit Panda
As the weather changes in Saudi-Pakistani relations, Pakistan will look to its “all-weather” partner China.
Last week, Chinese President Xi Jinping visited Pakistan to a warm welcome. He left having signed scores of agreements that commit, over several years, billions in Chinese financing and support for various Pakistani infrastructure projects. Beset with a range of problems, Pakistan lacks the indigenous capacity to invest adequately in its own power and infrastructure needs, despite facing major shortfalls in these areas. China and Pakistan enjoy a special relationship by their own admission: they refer to their partnership as an “all weather” one and Xi, prior to arriving in Islamabad, remarked that he felt as if he was “going to visit the home of [his] own brother.”
Still, despite the warm rhetoric toward China and years of positive ties between the two countries, when it came to backing Pakistan, both financially and politically, Islamabad had always found support flowing in from the Arabian peninsula to its west. Arab states, most notably Saudi Arabia, have long supported Pakistan at times when it found itself isolated by the international community. Pakistan, in turn, maintains close ties with the Arab world. With Saudi Arabia in particular, Pakistan enjoys a close security relationship. From the early Cold War years through the 1990s, Pakistani military assistance was somewhat taken for granted by Saudi Arabia. Last year, Riyadh gave Pakistan $1.5 billion in an “unconditional grant” to shore up its foreign exchange reserve to service its debts. Additionally, after Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif was ousted in a coup in 1999, Riyadh hosted him during his years of exile.
It was Sharif who oversaw Xi’s visit to Pakistan last week, and it was Sharif who complied with the Pakistani parliament’s decision to stay out of Saudi Arabia’s “Operation Decisive Storm” — an air campaign launched in late March against the Houthi rebels in Yemen, led by Saudi Arabia with a coalition of Arab states and the United States backing it. Pakistan’s decision to stay out of the conflict stunned observers on the Arabian peninsula. Anwar Gargash, the United Arab Emirates’ minister of state for foreign affairs, condemned what he saw as Pakistan’s “contradictory and dangerous” move.
Read the full story at The Diplomat