Daily Times

Finance Minister Ishaq Dar got caught with his hand in the cookie jar recently. The goodies in this instance were a $ 1.5 billion bailout deposited into Pakistan’s coffers by what Mr Dar described as a “friendly donor who wished to remain anonymous”. Within hours a foreign news agency revealed Pakistan’s secret Santa as none other than the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) — the perennial political benefactor of Prime Minister (PM) Mian Nawaz Sharif and his party. It swiftly busted the myth that while the country was otherwise going to the dogs, the ‘Ishaqonomics’ miracle had by itself stabilised the Pakistani rupee against the greenback. Finally, the PM’s national security advisor Mr Sartaj Aziz conceded in the Senate that it was indeed the Saudis who had again pulled the Pakistan Muslim League Nawaz’s (PML-N’s) chestnuts out of the fire, an economic one this time.

Messrs. Dar and Aziz have insisted that the donor gifted the money out of sheer goodness of heart with no strings attached. Some media people have even thrown around the religious term Qarza-e-hasana, which is a loan given purely to seek the blessings of the Almighty, with the understanding that the borrower may or may not return it. Now both Mr Dar and Mr Sartaj Aziz, who earned the nickname Surcharge Aziz when he held the finance portfolio in a previous PML-N government, know full well that there is no free lunch in life, economics and geopolitics. Like any other power, the Saudis like to reap decent returns on their investments. Historically, even the paltriest of Saudi investments have not been unconditional. Afghanistan watchers will recall the case of Ustad Sayyaf, who is one of the presidential hopefuls in next month’s Afghan elections.

When, after the Soviet arrival in Afghanistan, Professor Abdul Rab Rasul Sayyaf ran off to Peshawar circa 1980, he was still Abdur Rasul Sayyaf. A few years later he suddenly added the prefix ‘Abdul Rab’ to his name. Sayyaf, head of his Ittehad-e-Islami faction, was considered a hardliner among the Mujahedeen rebels fighting the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan then. With the Saudi largesse flowing into Pakistan at the time, it was abundantly clear that Sayyaf’s name change was not that frivolous after all. The Saudis considered Abdul Rasul, literally meaning the servant of the Prophet Mohammad (PBUH), a heresy and asked Sayyaf to change it. Steve Coll has noted in his masterpiece The Ghost Wars that Ahmed Badeeb, the chief of staff to the Saudi intelligence boss Prince Turki al-Faisal, had handpicked Sayyaf to rebut Yasser Arafat’s pro-Soviet speech at an OIC conference in Taif, KSA. But Badeeb was unhappy with Sayyaf’s name and decided to pick one for him, i.e. Abdur Rab, which means the servant of God. While Coll imprecisely mentions grammatical and tribal status issues with Sayyaf’s original name, it was actually for purely doctrinal reasons that Badeeb gave him a Wahabi-compliant name. Sayyaf later served as one of the conduits into Afghanistan for Osama bin Laden who the Saudis had dispatched to lead the Arab contingent there.

The point is that no matter what the PML-N spin-doctors claim, their government appears to have accepted a down payment to plunge Pakistan into a Saudi war against Syria. But the problem is perhaps bigger than meddling in the internal affairs of a sovereign state. The potential disintegration of Syria as a nation state could trigger a domino effect that could upend the post-Ottoman order in the Middle East with sectarian Balkanisation and end up creating not just denominational strife but assorted sectarian or confessional states. The predominantly multi-confessional states like Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Kuwait, Bahrain and Saudi Arabia itself could see upheavals that none has quite experienced before. However, even more volatile and thus worst hit could be the multi-ethnic and multi-confessional states outside the Middle East, i.e. Pakistan and Afghanistan.

By aligning Pakistan with the Saudis in a conflict that might rip the Middle East along sectarian seams, Nawaz Sharif seems to be making a conscious decision to set this country up to formally become a Wahabi confessional state eventually. Mr Sharif, personally beholden to the Saudis like Ustad Sayyaf, may be signing on to a not just a personal name change but to changing the country’s already abysmal confessional outlook for the worse. What is deeply disconcerting is not the small arms that Pakistan has agreed to provide the Saudis, destined for Syrian rebels in all likelihood, but the bigger doctrinal mess that Mr Sharif might be dragging the country into. It seems like Nawaz Sharif just picked up on doing the Saudi’s bidding exactly from where he left off in 1999. The way Mr Sharif’s government accepted the Saudi money and how his lieutenants tried to cover it up reeks of the present rulers putting personal preferences, perhaps even doctrinal ones, above the national interest. Nawaz Sharif’s kid-glove handling of the Lashkar-e-Jhangvi’s political front, the Ahle Sunnat Wal Jamaat party, which recently boasted of ‘scoring a century’ (of Shiite killings) in Quetta at a rally there, appears in part due to their mutual secret Santa based in Riyadh.

On the eve of the Saudi invasion of Bahrain three years ago, I had noted in this paper that, “It is the divergence not confluence of US-Saudi-Pakistani interests that is the trigger for potential Pakistani involvement there” (‘Mercenaries for the Middle East’, Daily Times, April 14, 2011). With the recent US-Iran détente, the Saudi policy now is to go it alone in the region in general and Syria in particular. The KSA could not even enlist Kuwait and Oman’s overt help while Qatar is pursuing an independent policy in Syria and in the region, which is at odds with the Saudis and more compatible with Turkey and the US. Even with the Crimean crisis ruining the US-Russia relationship, they are unlikely to duel it out in Syria any more than they already have been lest the Sykes-Picot nation states arrangement goes up in flames. This scenario has no takers, including China. While most of the world and regional powers would like to see Bashar al-Assad contained if not out, they do not want to see al Qaeda-linked savages replacing him. Restraining Iran and Bashar al-Assad at the risk of unleashing jihadist trouble in Israel’s backyard is just not going to happen. The UAE, Bahrain and Pakistan are the only allies that the Wahabi monarchy in Riyadh now has. Nawaz Sharif must rethink taking Pakistan down that rather lonely road, which leads only to a confessional state disaster.

The writer can be reached at mazdaki@me.com and he tweets @mazdaki