Saudi Arabia’s crown prince Muhammad bin Salman (MbS) is quietly strengthening his grip on Pakistan. This is the goal of the Saudi-led Persian Gulf Arab bloc’s recent charm offensive, where the UAE’s crown prince Sheikh Muhammad bin Zayed visited Islamabad last month and finalized a $6.2 billion bailout package, while MbS is planning to visit this month and announce an even larger amount in investments. The two are taking advantage of Pakistan’s infamous foreign currency crunch and Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan’s reluctance to accept a politically unfavorable IMF bailout, which leaves him no choice but to play along. Following Sheikh Muhammad bin Zayed’s visit, Prime Minister Khan took to Instagram to thank the crown prince, and Pakistan has just announced that UAE citizens can now obtain visas to Pakistan on arrival. The same, likely in an even more over-the-top fashion, is likely to follow MbS’s visit.

This is the same Imran Khan who, in 2015, prior to becoming prime minister, opposed sending Pakistani troops to support Saudi military operations in Yemen. Why the sudden honeymoon? Because there is a marriage of convenience at stake. Pakistan’s desperation is evident. Prime Minister Khan blatantly told a reporter last October that he could not afford to rebuke MbS in response to journalist Jamal Khashoggi’s murder in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul and risk falling out of his good books, because “We’re desperate at the moment.” Saudi Arabia’s efforts, on the other hand, are a telling sign of the current mood in the region and its geopolitical calculations. Its rivalry with Iran is stronger than ever (which may even lead to a thaw between Saudi Arabia and Israel – politics makes for strange bedfellows indeed). MbS has already said that “without a doubt if Iran developed a nuclear bomb, we will follow suit as soon as possible,” and has been trying to convince the US to sell him designs for nuclear power plants. Conveniently, Pakistan already has quite a substantial stockpile of nuclear weapons, and nuclear cooperation with Pakistan has always been on Saudi Arabia’s agenda. The current environment in the region makes it a priority. In other words, Saudi Arabia’s efforts to bind Pakistan to itself is not just an effort to lure it away from Iran, but also to support its own ambitions in a potential regional nuclear arms race.

However, this wallet diplomacy of Saudi Arabia, which allows it to be a self-declared “participant” in Pakistan’s affairs, does not bode well for Pakistan. Saudi Arabia has done great damage to the country by supporting its Islamization and subsequent radicalization: recall the days of General Zia ul-Haq, who enforced an intense program of Islamization. The General was strongly backed by Saudi Arabia. In fact, Pakistan’s largest mosque is the Faisal Mosque, the namesake of then-Saudi monarch Faisal bin Abdulaziz al Saud who provided a grant for its construction. It is widely known that the religious schools established during this time helped spread a very strict and intolerant version of Islam that is personified by the Wahhabi faith represented by Saudi Arabia, which is a direct contributor to the rampant extremist militia activity we see in Pakistan today and the reality that candidates with ties to these groups are even running for elections in large numbers. Consider the radicalism stemming from the Red Mosque, whose founder was a close friend of General Zia ul-Haq and whose links to terror groups and violent attacks culminated in a military siege of the mosque in 2007.

Furthermore, Pakistani state and military leaders may have traditionally been closer to Saudi Arabia, but Pakistan has a far deeper historic relationship with Iran. On the state level, both Pakistan and Iran were in the Central Treaty Organization from 1955 to 1979, a defensive organization for shared political, military and economic goals during the Cold War (other member states were Turkey, Iraq, and Great Britain). Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif was the first foreign dignitary to visit Prime Minister Khan. And Pakistan’s culture, history and civilization actually shares far more with Iran than it does with Saudi Arabia: the official language of the Mughal Empire that ruled the area for over three centuries was Farsi, during which time Persian art and culture, and in particular literature, flourished. The greatest poets of the Mughals, such as Mirza Ghalib and Mir Taqi Mir, had Farsi divans. Urdu, as a language, is a heavily Persianized evolution from Hindustani, and the current national anthem of Pakistan is in Farsi. The country’s founder, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, was born a Shia. Iran is also a direct neighbor of Pakistan with a shared population of Balochis on both sides of the border, adding to the shared heritage, culture, and ties between the two countries.

Let us also not forget the sizable Shia population in Pakistan, generally estimated at 15-20% of the population. The Shia, particularly the Hazaras, are already a targeted population by Pakistan’s extremist groups. Saudi Arabia’s increased involvement, with all of its ideological implications as well as its known support for terrorist groups, will only increase extremism and sectarian violence.

Saudi Arabia is playing a dangerous game in Pakistan. In doing so, it is going against history and civilization. It risks sparking sectarian tensions, radicalizing the population, not to mention investing in an arms race that will only further polarize the region.

By Ardavan Amir-Aslani

I recently wrote about the plight of the Shia in Bahrain in the context of that country’s parliamentary elections that took place last November. I argued that the Bahraini government was oppressing its Shia-majority population with the backing of Saudi Arabia, fueling grievances and dissent against it, and therefore actually widening the gap between the Shia majority and the government – to Iran’s benefit. Across the 25km causeway that connects the two countries, Saudi Arabia is dealing with dissent from its own Shia population at home and taking similarly oppressive measures, leading to similar grievances and dissent which resulted in yet more clashes earlier this month. With these growing tensions, the future of the Arab Sheikdoms of the Persian Gulf is becoming increasingly uncertain.

The aforementioned incident took place in the Qatif area of Saudi Arabia’s Eastern Province on January 7, in what Saudi officials called a “preemptive security operation against terrorists”. Six militants were killed, and a stash of light weaponry was confiscated. Qatif is one of the areas where Saudi Arabia’s Shia, who make up about 10-15% of the entire population, is heavily concentrated. It also happens to be where most of Saudi Arabia’s oil and gas fields are located, adding another dimension to the sectarian dynamics.

The overwhelmingly Shia-majority Qatif area has been a thorn in the Saudi government’s side long before the most violent confrontations of the last few years. Starting with protests in 1979 that corresponded with the Iranian revolution, the whole Qatif area has periodically had unrest and the Saudi government’s heavy-handed oppression is well-known. When Muhammad bin Salman (MbS) became crown prince in early 2017, his series of reforms to improve the kingdom’s image did not prevent some of the most violent security operations the area has seen, which nearly completely destroyed the town of Awamiya, well into 2017. However, as part of MbS’s charm offensive, the Saudi government did also invest more than $60 million to rebuild (and another $230 million to compensate residents) in this area that had only about 30,000 residents to begin with. But there is a reason for the emphasis on Awamiya and its transformation into a “model neighborhood”: Awamiya has the added symbolic significance of being the hometown of Sheikh Nimr al-Nimr – a prominent Shia cleric who actively supported the Saudi episode of the Arab Spring protests in 2011 and was executed with 46 others on terrorism charges in January 2016. Today, the Saudi government is promoting the “facelift” of Awamiya, which included transforming its 400-year-old historic Musawara neighborhood, with the hopes that pumping money into infrastructure and developing public spaces can blunt the dissent and buy residents’ acquiescence.

In June of last year, Human Rights Watch released a damning briefing on the systematic discrimination and incitement against the Shia of Saudi Arabia in public education, the justice system, religious freedom, and employment. The report documents what was already known about the Shia in Saudi Arabia: they are not allowed public places of worship; the times they have been appointed to public-sector jobs in diplomacy, the military, justice system, or security forces can be counted on the fingers of one hand; they are commonly discriminated against by the justice system; and face widespread incitement. The reason is not just sectarian: Shia populations across the Middle East are commonly regarded as fifth columnists of Iran. But in continuing to alienate this population, just like in Bahrain, the Saudi government risks driving them into seeking the protection of Iran. MbS may be less worried than Bahrain’s al Khalifa government since his Shia population is only a minority, unlike in Bahrain, but with tensions running high in the region and particularly between Saudi Arabia and Iran, even a minority may be enough to create a problem to be reckoned with. And according to another Human Rights Watch report released only a few months ago, MbS’s baby steps vis-à-vis his Shia minority may not be enough to prevent this from happening.

There is an interesting map that was published by the Armed Forces Journal back in 2006, which the website re-upped in 2013, called “Blood Borders”. In this map, a retired American military officer by the name of Ralph Peters redraws the borders of the Middle East according to ethnic, sectarian, and tribal lines (not accounting for all of them but for the biggest ones) and suggests that doing so could ease the tensions in the region. According to this infamous map, some of the countries are untouched, but, for example Saudi Arabia is split into several countries, one of which is an Arab Shia state that shares the Qatif area of Saudi Arabia and all of Bahrain. Considering the last 50 years of tensions and all-out wars in the region, the extent to which internal strife weakens states, not to mention the grounds they provide for states to meddle in each other’s affairs, perhaps Peters is onto something.

By Ardavan Amir-Aslani