The Saudi-Pakistan Strategic Mutual Defence Agreement was signed in Riyadh by Saudi Crown Prince and Prime Minister Mohammed bin Salman and Pakistan Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif this week. The pact pledges that an attack on either country will be treated as an act of aggression against both. This is not just an upgrade of their long-standing defence ties. And it is certainly not about India.

Since the 1960s, the Pakistan Army has played a vital role in the security of Saudi Arabia, with boots on the ground, training and defence equipment.

It is Pakistan's most consequential relationship in the Islamic world. Despite the widespread Indian belief that the Modi government has succeeded in drawing Saudi away from Pakistan, the Saudi-Pakistan relationship, based on Islamic brotherhood and mutual commitments to stand “shoulder to shoulder”, remains solid.

It is the only country that can make periodic interventions in Pakistan's troubled politics, without Pakistanis objecting. The Pakistani Army has stationed a large contingent of its soldiers in the kingdom, an arrangement that has existed for decades and strengthened after the 1979 siege of Mecca. 

The inclusion of “strategic” in the just-inked agreement, however, indicates more than Pakistan just sending soldiers to guard Islam's holy sites or train its soldiers. Pakistan is a nuclear-armed country, and the pact has retrained attention on the notion of an “Islamic bomb”, first floated by the late Zulfikar Ali Bhutto from his jail cell in 1977.

Two and a half decades later, AQ Khan would bring infamy to Pakistan's nuclear programme with the 2003 detection of his proliferation racket. Gen Pervez Musharraf, then Pakistan's military ruler, was quick to distance his Army from Khan, but suspicions that the “father of the Islamic bomb” was not a solo operator never went away.

This time, though, the alarm that gripped the US in the 2000s after the discovery of Khan's dealings with Libya, Iran and North Korea shortly after 9/11, is strangely absent. Or perhaps, this is not so strange.

The timing of the agreement, days after the Israeli bombing of Qatar, seemingly suggests a connection between the two – a strong message to Tel Aviv of Islamic solidarity and of countries in the region looking out for their own security arrangements after the US reneged on its obligations as a security guarantor of its ally Qatar, looking the other way when Israel bombed Doha, with the declared intention of killing senior leaders of the Hamas.

The signalling also suits the royals in Saudi and the hybrid Army-civilian government in Islamabad, as it may mollify domestic audiences, restive and outraged at Israel's unbridled and expanding aggression, that, as Islamic countries, they are actively attempting to retrieve some sovereign agency against Israel.

The fact of the matter, though, is that Saudi Arabia, which hosts a big US base with over 2,000 soldiers, has little to fear from Israel. Both are cousins once removed, linked through their robust relationship with the US. It is an open secret that the Israel-Saudi relationship might have emerged from the shadows where it has remained for decades, had it not been for the Hamas attack in Israel and Israel's war on Gaza.

As for the US, during President Donald Trump's visit to the kingdom in May this year, the two sides concluded what the White House described as the “largest defence sales agreement in history” worth nearly $142 billion.

The agreement, which the White House said covers five broad categories of warfare capabilities, provides Saudi Arabia with state-of-the-art equipment and services from over a dozen US defence firms. The warfare capabilities include air and space, air and missile defence, maritime and coastal, land forces, and information and communication systems.

So, who is Trump arming Saudi Arabia against? All three countries – Saudi Arabia, the US and Iran – have a common enemy, and that is Iran. 

“The target of the Saudi-Pakistan agreement is not Israel. It is Iran that is likely to be the most worried and most suspicious about this,” said Ayesha Siddiqa, Pakistani commentator and author of two books on the Pakistan military, pointing out the pact's announcement after the Israeli aggression in Qatar was “convenient timing” for the two signatories.

It is unlikely that Pakistan would sign a “strategic” defence partnership in the region without a go-ahead from the US, particularly at this time, when relations between the two countries have hit a high. Trump and Pakistan's Army chief and de facto ruler General Asim Munir discussed the Iran-Israel conflict during their lunch meeting in Washington. Or else an agreement like this would run the risk of Iran-like dismemberment of Pakistan's nuclear programme. For Pakistan, the reward is the Saudi backstop of its financial and energy security.

According to a Reuters report, when asked whether Pakistan would be obliged to provide Saudi Arabia with a nuclear umbrella under the pact, the official said: “This is a comprehensive defensive agreement that encompasses all military means.”

Siddiqa warned that the agreement could act to spur Iran on its nuclear programme, set back but not fully destroyed by the US and Israeli strikes on its nuclear sites in June this year. It may also add to the tensions in the carefully calibrated relations between Iran and Pakistan, where the extremism-fuelled sectarian divide between Sunni and Shia is a permanent cause of tension between the two neighbours. 

The agreement shows not just the current geopolitical changes in West Asia, but Pakistan's 180-degree turn in the last 10 years. In 2015, Nawaz Sharif, then the Prime Minister, refused to participate in the “Sunni alliance” that the Saudis summoned against the Houthis in Yemen, stating that Pakistan would remain neutral in the conflict. This, in spite of the tight personal ties between the Sharif family and the Saudi rulers.

Clearly, the Pakistan Army had calculated the costs of getting into a messy regional dispute that showed no chance of early resolution, and of enmity with Iran, with which Pakistan shares a border in Balochistan. 

Cut to 2025. Pakistan desperately needs the cash and oil infusions from Saudi Arabia and Trump's friendly attention. Ten years ago, the Saudi summons to Yemen was debated in the National Assembly over several days, with parliamentarians thrashing out the pros and cons of antagonising an elder “biradar”, which is how Pakistan sees Saudi Arabia. No debates this time, just the announcement that the defence partnership had been upgraded.

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