Khawarij Barrage

Security forces are doing brave and necessary work. The recent operations in Kharan and Khuzdar demonstrate the seriousness of the campaign against terrorism. Seven militants were killed in Kharan and another 10 in Khuzdar.

According to officials, they were involved in extortion, kidnapping, targeted killings and preparations for suicide attacks. Removing such threats before they can strike saves innocent lives. Operation Radd-ul-Fitna 3 is therefore a necessary step and deserves national support.

These militants do not operate in isolation. Officials have repeatedly alleged that groups described as Fitna al-Khawarij and Fitna al-Hindustan receive external support, including from India. If so, the challenge goes beyond ordinary law and order. It becomes a question of national security and sovereignty.


But bullets and operations alone cannot solve the problem. The numbers tell a sobering story. Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Balochistan together accounted for nearly 96 per cent of all violence-related deaths in the country during the second quarter of 2026.

Such a concentration of violence cannot be addressed through military means alone. It demands sustained political attention as well.

The government must therefore look beyond security operations. People in these provinces need jobs, functioning schools and hospitals, credible political representation and a meaningful voice in decision-making. Years of neglect and mistrust have created spaces that militant groups can exploit to recruit disaffected young men.

Corrective political measures, honest engagement with local communities and equitable development spending must accompany all military campaigns. None of this diminishes the necessity of confronting terrorists with force. It simply recognises that counterterrorism succeeds most decisively when militants are denied not only territory, but also the grievances and alienation they seek to exploit.

Security forces can win battles on the ground. Lasting peace in Balochistan and KP, however, will come only when the state also succeeds in winning the confidence of its own people. *

No Excuses

Armoured vehicles rolled past the former US embassy in Kabul on Saturday as the Taliban celebrated five years of what they call victory over foreign domination. But the parade was the easy part. Five years after seizing Kabul, the Taliban no longer have the luxury of presenting themselves as insurgents who inherited someone else’s failures. Afghanistan’s borders and security apparatus are theirs. So are the consequences.

The gravest indictment is their failure to prevent Afghan territory from becoming a sanctuary for forces threatening their neighbours, despite repeated assurances to the contrary. The latest UN Security Council-mandated monitoring report says the Taliban authorities have “continued their support” for the TTP. Even if Kabul claims to have relocated around 2,000 TTP fighters and Mullah Hibatullah Akhundzada has reportedly warned the group’s leadership to halt attacks against Pakistan, the threat has not diminished. The TTP’s command, training and logistical networks have not been dismantled, and the same UN assessment points to growing operational and facilitation links involving the TTP, Al Qaeda, IS-K and other militant actors.Geographic Reference

That contrast is particularly damning. The Taliban fight IS-K with considerable force because it threatens their own rule. What Pakistan is entitled to ask is why comparable resolve disappears when the militants concerned share ideological or historical affinities with the Taliban.

Its treatment of women provides an equally devastating record of government by exclusion. Afghanistan is the only country in the world where girls and women are formally barred from secondary and higher education. UNESCO estimates that 2.4 million girls have been denied secondary education since 2021. More than 90 per cent of Afghan 10-year-olds cannot read a simple text, and the country could face a shortage of more than 11,000 qualified female teachers by 2030.

Calling this a cultural preference has become untenable. It is state policy directed against half the population. The Taliban have issued more than 100 decrees restricting women and girls. Female employment stands at roughly 7 per cent, and UN experts have warned that this systematic and institutionalised exclusion may amount to gender apartheid.Pakistan regional tours

Afghanistan desperately needs doctors, nurses, teachers, entrepreneurs and skilled workers, yet its rulers have deliberately blocked millions of women from becoming any of these. The Taliban complain of poverty and isolation while pursuing policies guaranteed to produce more of both.

The humanitarian numbers expose the price. Around 21.9 million Afghans, or roughly 45pc of the population, require humanitarian assistance this year. Aid organisations say the number in need has risen by 3.5 million since the Taliban takeover, while the UN’s $1.7 billion humanitarian appeal is only about one-quarter funded. Donor fatigue is real, and ordinary Afghans should not be punished for the conduct of their rulers. But Kabul cannot endlessly blame outsiders for a humanitarian emergency while restricting female aid workers, hollowing out education and deliberately shrinking the productive capacity of its own population.

Reconstruction Test

The government’s assurance that Balochistan’s flood-hit families have not been abandoned would have carried greater weight had it not followed weeks of confusion over precisely who remains entitled to housing assistance.

The Planning Ministry insists that all 68,992 houses classified as fully damaged under the post-disaster assessment remain covered and that more than 26,000 have already been completed. It also argues, reasonably, that reconstruction cannot mean houses alone. Roads, irrigation channels, schools, health facilities and water systems are equally necessary if vulnerable communities are to withstand the next disaster.


The World Bank points to a considerably larger pool of verified eligible households and warns that 119,049 may now be without identified financing.

Post-disaster reconstruction is not an ordinary development scheme whose allocations may be shuffled without consequence. Once households have been surveyed, their losses verified and expectations of assistance formally created, any subsequent change in eligibility requires a clear explanation.Executive Branch

There is nothing inherently improper about reallocating resources within an integrated resilience programme. Rebuilding a house beside a broken irrigation system, inaccessible road and non-functional health facility would scarcely amount to resilience.

But suspected irregularities must be identified and dealt with individually. They cannot become a fog behind which legitimate beneficiaries disappear.

The stakes extend well beyond one housing programme. The 2022 floods inflicted damage and economic losses exceeding $30 billion, while resilient reconstruction needs were estimated above $16 billion. Pakistan has since made climate justice a central plank of its international diplomacy, arguing – with considerable justification – that countries contributing relatively little to global emissions should not be left alone to bear the costs of an increasingly hostile climate.

That case, however, carries obligations at home. Pakistan cannot persuasively ask the world to finance adaptation while allowing uncertainty over who receives financing secured in the name of climate-affected citizens.Pakistan travel guides

Pakistan has repeatedly proved adept at assembling pledges after catastrophe. The more difficult work begins afterwards as seemingly mundane administrative tasks often determine whether a billion-dollar programme becomes reconstruction or merely another entry in a donor spreadsheet.

There is a larger lesson here as we seek climate and development finance. Access to money will increasingly depend not simply on the country’s vulnerability but on its capacity to absorb funds credibly, execute projects efficiently and demonstrate results. Every poorly explained beneficiary list today risks weakening tomorrow’s case before international financiers.

Oslo in Islamabad

Barely three months after Narendra Modi made the first visit to Norway by an Indian prime minister in 43 years, Norwegian Foreign Minister Espen Barth Eide stood beside Foreign Minister Ishaq Dar in Islamabad on Thursday as the latter briefed him on Pakistan’s position that Jammu and Kashmir “remains one of the longstanding unresolved international disputes.”

Mr Eide also described Islamabad’s mediation as a “massive task” and said the work of Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif, Mr Dar and Field Marshal Asim Munir amounted to a “service to the world.”

Norway had already declared full support for Pakistan-led mediation in April. Coming from a country that has invested decades in peace facilitation, from the Oslo process to Colombia and several other conflicts, such praise carries considerably more weight than routine diplomatic courtesy.

Norway is a founding NATO member, a close American ally and one of Europe’s consequential maritime and energy powers. Its foreign minister discussed regional security and expanding defence engagement at GHQ, while also expressing interest in Pakistan’s new trilateral defence arrangement with Saudi Arabia and Türkiye–three states with which, he noted, Norway maintains close relations. Pakistan’s growing diplomatic profile is acquiring something more useful than favourable headlines: access across political and security establishments.Geographic Reference

Mr Dar also noted that Pakistan’s IT exports to Norway have increased more than fivefold in two years, even as bilateral trade remains well below potential. Cooperation under Article 6 of the Paris Agreement, Norwegian expertise in shipping and maritime regulation, skilled-labour pathways and existing commercial links such as Yara’s partnership with Fauji Fertiliser offer considerably more substance. Mr Eide also described Norway’s Pakistani diaspora as an argument for deeper economic ties.

Pakistan has lately demonstrated that diplomatic usefulness can reopen doors once considered difficult to enter. The greater prize now lies in turning political access into investment, trade and sustained international attention to Pakistan’s own concerns. *

Need for Stability

The past few days have seen hundreds of fishing boats and trawlers leave Karachi, Gwadar and Jiwani on 40-day catch-and-sell voyages, hoping diplomacy will accomplish something before their holds are full. That wager looked shakier on Wednesday as Tehran said there had been “absolutely no progress” towards restoring the June understanding with Washington.

A day earlier, the maritime war had moved closer still when a US Navy helicopter disabled a Panama-flagged cargo ship in the Gulf of Oman, around 70 nautical miles off Pakistan, for allegedly attempting to breach Washington’s blockade of Iranian ports.

Pakistan’s tuna trade with Iran has already been near a standstill since February. Recent strikes on Konarak, Pasabandar and Beris have made familiar Iranian markets increasingly dangerous, while three fishermen were killed and 15 injured in a US strike on a commercial pier at Sirik last month. The vulnerability, however, was built long before the missiles arrived. Fishermen say Iranian buyers can pay six or seven times Pakistani prices for tuna, while subsidised Iranian fuel has traditionally travelled in the opposite direction.Pakistan regional tours


That arrangement made commercial sense until geopolitics removed both ends of it. Weak domestic demand, inadequate cold storage and limited processing leave fishermen with few profitable alternatives once Iranian ports close.

A perishable catch cannot wait patiently for diplomacy. The Pakistan Boat Building Association says new orders have consequently fallen by as much as 90 per cent; an industry accustomed to building 25 to 30 large vessels annually for Iranian clients has received none for five months.

The wider export picture is more encouraging. The Maritime Affairs Ministry says seafood exports reached a record $568 million in FY26, with frozen fish alone earning $105 million. Pakistan has also widened access to foreign markets through improved certification and regulatory compliance. These gains expose how unevenly modernisation has travelled along the coast. Pakistan catches valuable fish, yet too much of the margin still depends on someone else’s cold chain, processing plant or market.Arabs & Middle Easterners

Iran should remain an important buyer. Geography gives Pakistan every reason to deepen commerce with its neighbour. Yet comparative advantage turns into dependence when the producer has nowhere else to sell.

The answer lies in giving Makran’s fishermen greater commercial time, in the form of reliable landing facilities, cold storage and primary processing around Gwadar, Pasni and Jiwani, which can preserve a catch long enough to find another buyer rather than surrender its value at the first closed border. *

President Asif Ali Zardari and Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif used National Minorities Day to renew an old promise: that faith should not determine a Pakistani citizen’s worth before the state. With the speeches delivered, however, the more difficult task is to give that promise meaning in everyday dealings between citizens and the state.

There is good reason to return to Quaid-i-Azam Mohammad Ali Jinnah’s August 11 address, but not simply because another anniversary has passed. A Pakistani, in his eyes, was to be a citizen “first, second, and last”, carrying equal rights and obligations regardless of creed. The responsibility rested with the state to deal with its citizens without grading their political worth according to religion.

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Before his assassination in 2011, Pakistan’s first Christian Federal Minorities Minister Shahbaz Bhatti had helped persuade the government to designate August 11 as National Minorities Day, pushed through the five per cent quota for minorities in federal employment and helped secure four non-Muslim seats in the Senate. Over fifteen years after his death, these measures remain part of Pakistan’s institutional architecture. Their uneven implementation is, nevertheless, the unfinished part of his legacy. Minority representatives still complain that quota positions go unfilled and that non-Muslim recruits remain disproportionately concentrated in lower-grade jobs.Geographic Reference

Another development deserves greater attention in the minority-rights debate. The Pakistani state has lately demonstrated that religious agitators and blasphemy vigilantes need not be allowed to dictate terms from the street. The ban imposed on Tehreek-i-Labbaik Pakistan was followed by arrests of its leaders, the sealing of mosques and the freezing of bank accounts.

Resultantly, according to the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, only 13 blasphemy cases were registered so far this year–roughly two-thirds fewer than before. Data supplied by the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data project show only one blasphemy-related riot or attack over the past 12 months, compared with an annual average of more than seven between 2021 and 2024.

For years, religious vigilantism was treated almost as a force of nature: dangerous, regrettable and too combustible for the state to confront decisively. Recent experience suggests otherwise. When the government, police and security establishment deny inciters organisational space, the temperature can fall. Recently in Karachi, police faced down hundreds gathered over an allegation against a Christian family, removed the family to safety and later found the accusation to be false.

The same administrative seriousness is also required in the case of allegations of forced conversion involving young Hindu and Christian girls. Reserved parliamentary seats may guarantee presence, but minority activists have a legitimate argument when they say representatives selected through party lists can become more answerable to party leaderships than to the communities they nominally represent. None of this requires Pakistan to dilute its Islamic identity. The founding father only demanded confidence in that identity: enough confidence to ensure that a Christian, Hindu, Sikh or any other citizen does not need a patron or an annual observance to establish their claim on the state. *

Threats and Talks

The diplomacy around Iran made another set of headlines on Tuesday when Defence Minister Khawaja Asif said signals from the previous two or three days suggested Washington and Tehran were close to “some sort” of arrangement. Meanwhile, Interior Minister Mohsin Naqvi landed in Tehran for the sixth time in the last six months for talks with Iranian officials amid mediation efforts.

As if to dampen growing hopes, US President Donald Trump offered his own strategic menu: let Iran fail economically or hit it “really, really hard.” A day earlier, he had demanded compensation from Tehran for damages to “the people of Lebanon, Syria, Yemen and Gaza.” Such contradictions have become more consequential than presidential theatrics.

Iran continues to make reopening Hormuz conditional on sanctions relief, access to frozen assets, an end to military threats and other concessions broadly resembling provisions discussed under the June understanding. Washington, meanwhile, maintains its blockade while seeking unhindered navigation through a waterway that normally carries roughly a fifth of global oil and LNG. Tehran’s use of maritime disruption as leverage deserves no romantic interpretation as attacks on commercial shipping have widened the economic battlefield and imposed costs far beyond the combatants. Yet months of American firepower, including another intensive campaign in July, have still failed to wrest control of the Strait from Iran.

That leaves both capitals confronting the limits of coercion. Iran can hurt regional economies and global energy markets, though prolonged closure also deepens its own isolation and economic pain. America can destroy another military site, tighten sanctions or hit another piece of infrastructure, but the political return from each additional strike has steadily diminished. A recent US poll put approval of Mr Trump’s handling of the war at just 28 per cent while 58 per cent expected gasoline prices to worsen. Eighteen American service members have been killed, and concerns persist over depleted stocks of precision long-range missiles.

The regional response is therefore worth watching more closely than another Truth Social broadside. Qatar’s latest assessment that the Hormuz talks are at an advanced stage matters because Doha, Muscat and Islamabad now appear to be working different parts of the same diplomatic puzzle.

There is still plenty that can go wrong. Four sailors were reported killed on Tuesday in an alleged Houthi attack in the Bab el-Mandeb. Every fresh missile adds another complication to fragile negotiations already carrying the weight of Hormuz, sanctions and Iran’s nuclear future.

Washington now needs steadiness more than another ultimatum. Tehran, too, will have to decide how much leverage it can extract before coercion begins consuming its diplomatic gains.

The mediators can keep carrying messages, narrowing differences and even keeping doors open. Yet, they cannot manufacture the political decision that still has to be made in Washington and Tehran. *

Jharkhand Protests

Thousands of young Indians marched towards the Jharkhand legislature on Monday, protesting alleged irregularities in civil-service recruitment examinations. Yet, just weeks after the massive “cockroach” protests, police again reached for water cannon, tear gas and batons. The agitation had already run for more than two weeks. Six protesters were reportedly on hunger strike. Ranchi may be the latest flashpoint, but the anger it represents has been travelling across India for some time.

Only weeks ago, Delhi witnessed the extraordinary rise of the self-styled Cockroach Janta Party, a youth movement born from fury over examination leaks, unemployment and an education system in which years of preparation can be erased by somebody selling a question paper. Its demonstrations helped force Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan from office in July. By early August, founder Abhijeet Dipke commanded more than 22 million Instagram followers. Social-media numbers are no substitute for votes, though politicians would be foolish to miss what such velocity says about the reservoir of resentment underneath.

An investigation tracing 45 major paper-leak cases between 2002 and 2025, each involving at least 100,000 candidates, found that only two had produced convictions. Of 1,658 people arrested, merely 18 were eventually convicted. Those figures speak volumes about what has driven young Indians onto the streets. For a middle-class or lower-income household that has poured savings into coaching and years of preparation, corruption in an examination hall carries a peculiar cruelty. Competitive testing is supposed to offer the child without connections a narrow passage towards security. Once the paper itself becomes merchandise, faith in that bargain begins to collapse.

Jobs make the bargain increasingly desperate. State of Working India 2026 puts unemployment among graduates aged 15 to 25 at nearly 40 per cent and around 20 per cent among those aged 25 to 29. India is approaching the peak of a demographic dividend celebrated for two decades in speeches about growth and national power, even as the expansion of higher education has outrun the creation of stable graduate employment.

Jharkhand complicates any easy partisan explanation because its government is opposed to Narendra Modi’s BJP. That makes Ranchi more politically consequential. Examination scandals and recruitment anger have escaped party boundaries, while New Delhi still carries the heavier burden of a national economic promise built around a young workforce. The Modi government has recognised the danger, announcing fast-track courts for examination-leak cases and scrambling to reconnect with young voters. Administrative repair, however, will have to travel considerably farther than social-media outreach.

There is an old danger in mistaking demographic abundance for economic strength. Young people become a dividend only when an economy can educate them, test them fairly and put their abilities to productive use. Otherwise their grievance add yet another layer to a heart-wrenching ledger of disappointed expectations. *

Cruel Irony

Pakistan was right on Sunday to dismiss as frivolous and baseless the Afghan Taliban’s latest attempt to portray weapons allegedly entering Afghanistan from Pakistan as evidence of “subversive activities.”

Kabul has made similar claims in the past without an iota of evidence: Paktia police said in May, June and July that consignments of rifles, pistols and ammunition had been smuggled across the border from Pakistan.

Quite expectedly, Afghanistan’s Ministry of Defence did not even pretend to acknowledge that when the republic had collapsed in August 2021, the Pentagon estimated at least $7.12 billion worth of US-funded equipment, supplied to the former Afghan security forces, remained in the country; much of it subsequently seized by the Taliban. Afghanistan had hardly been short of weapons before then. Soviet arms, civil-war stockpiles, Kalashnikovs accumulated through four decades of conflict and the NATO-pattern arsenal of the post-2001 state had already made the country one of the region’s great repositories of military hardware.Geographic Reference


Kabul’s own record makes its new morality tale harder to sustain. Small Arms Survey researchers found functioning weapons markets in Afghan border provinces, with thriving informal trading and trafficking networks rooted in old relationships among fighters, armed groups and smugglers. Taliban intelligence has itself seized hundreds of weapons in door-to-door searches of civilian and former Afghan security-force homes. The Taliban may now be trying to bring that sprawling armoury under tighter control, yet the very scale of its confiscation campaigns tells us how widely those weapons had dispersed.

Only three weeks ago, Kabul announced the arrest of 16 people allegedly trying to smuggle weapons, ammunition and narcotics out of Afghanistan.

Pakistan has more reason than most countries to resent this rewriting of the ledger. International thinktanks and peacekeeping bodies have now joined its reservations against Taliban-allied groups, especially the TTP, which continue to enjoy access to US-origin weaponry. US-made rifles, night-vision equipment and thermal sights have repeatedly surfaced among militants fighting Pakistani forces.

For five years, the Taliban authorities have presided over a security order in which terrorist organisations have retained room to operate, regroup and acquire increasingly sophisticated weaponry. Pakistan has heavily paid for that permissiveness with thousands os soldiers, policemen and civilians. Hollow accusations cannot alter uncomfortable facts on the ground. Before Kabul lectures Pakistan about weapons entering its house, it would do well to account for the armoury already inside it.

Monsters Among Us

Despite the labyrinth of harrowing tales of abuse around us, a family in Karachi would hardly have thought twice about their relative, a 17-year-old, frequently visiting their house and taking their toddler daughter outside to buy her treats.

On Tuesday evening, however, he brought her back unconscious. By the time the family rushed her to hospital, the one-and-a-half-year-old was dead. An arrest has been made under Section 302 of the Pakistan Penal Code, while initial medico-legal findings point towards sexual assault. Yet, as the final post-mortem report is awaited, social media is abuzz with hashtags and calls for swift justice.

Horrific as that sequence is, its most unsettling detail lies in its familiarity. That should trouble every household far and beyond because the comforting picture of the predator as a stranger waiting outside the gate has never quite survived the evidence. Sahil’s Cruel Numbers 2025 recorded 3,630 reported cases of child abuse across Pakistan, an eight per cent increase over the preceding year and an average of more than nine every day. There were 1,107 abductions, 596 cases classified as sodomy, 522 rapes, 108 gang rapes and 58 children murdered after sexual abuse. Girls accounted for 53 per cent of the recorded victims, while children between 11 and 15 formed the most vulnerable age group. Most tragically, acquaintances remained the most commonly reported relationship between victims and alleged perpetrators.City & Local Guides


Even this grim ledger can only account for the tip of the iceberg, for we have no trace of those who were silenced by fear or paralysed by shame.

That an FIR can record a crime does little to carry a child through the long corridor from investigation and medical evidence to prosecution, testimony and judgment. Sahil says 82 per cent of the cases it recorded were registered with police, while research points to a conviction rate below one per cent.

Yes, laws have been enacted, helplines advertised, and child-protection authorities created. UNICEF, nevertheless, continues to point to the absence of a nationally coordinated public case-management and referral system meeting international standards. That gap is felt in the most private places: homes, schools, neighbourhoods and institutions where a frightened child may have no idea whom to tell, or whether telling will change anything.

Dostoevsky’s Ivan Karamazov could find no grand design worth the suffering of an innocent child. Pakistan needs no philosophy to understand the smaller obligation before it. A girl barely old enough to recognise faces left this world just because the very hands she had placed her tiny faith in belonged not to humans but to deranged monsters walking among us.

No Scapegoating

Iran and Oman have agreed the contours of a new navigation arrangement for the Strait of Hormuz on Saturday, but anyone tempted to make new declarations should look at what seems to be happening alongside it. Tehran’s Revolutionary Guards have made clear the waterway would not fully reopen until Washington accepted Iran’s wider conditions, while the United States said its blockade of Iranian ports would be lifted once unhindered commercial traffic resumed. Meanwhile, the UAE accused Iran of firing a missile at another oil tanker. ADNOC says its ships have now been targeted in 15 missile and drone attacks since the war began.

This glaring contradiction between diplomacy and active war fronts tells us more about the endgame than declarations of an imminent agreement. Hormuz is no longer merely the artery through which roughly a fifth of internationally traded oil and gas normally moves. Tehran is clearly attempting to turn its capacity to disrupt that waterway into bargaining power over the political settlement itself.


Washington faces the opposite dilemma. It retains the capacity to inflict vastly greater military damage, but nearly six months of war have exposed the difference between destroying targets and imposing an acceptable political outcome. Reports that senior US military commanders have privately urged senior Trump officials to find an off-ramp are important for precisely this reason. From the looks of it, America’s problem is not finding another target. It is the diminishing political return from hitting one.History

Nor can Tehran indefinitely enjoy the leverage it has manufactured. Closing Hormuz hurts Gulf economies, exposes Iranian infrastructure to further attacks and accelerates regional efforts to insure themselves against Iranian coercion. The Mecca Joint Defence Agreement signed by Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Türkiye is perhaps the clearest evidence yet that this war is producing a security architecture of its own.

Pakistan sits unusually close to both sides of this emerging equation. Islamabad has supported regional ownership of the Hormuz question, where Oman has naturally assumed a central role, while Pakistan remains engaged with the broader settlement envisaged under the Islamabad MoU. Such a division of diplomatic labour makes sense. Pakistan’s advantage has never rested on overwhelming economic leverage, relying on its geography, access and hard-earned credibility to keep a window open when Washington and Tehran reach a mutually hurting stalemate.

Pakistan should therefore not be made the scapegoat if the peace process again breaks down. Mediation is not guardianship. Islamabad cannot manufacture trust between divided adversaries. The persistence of confrontation reflects the principals’ unresolved demands far more than the mediator.Arabs & Middle Easterners


The immediate question, therefore, is not whether Saturday’s Hormuz framework ends the war. It plainly does not. It is whether Washington and Tehran can now turn the coercive leverage each has accumulated into compromises neither could obtain by force.

The Makkah Pact

The Makkah Joint Defence Agreement does something more consequential than add another name to Pakistan’s long bespeckled list of friendly-country accords.

By declaring that an armed attack on Pakistan, Saudi Arabia or Türkiye would be treated as an attack on all three, it converts years of defence cooperation into a stated principle of collective deterrence. The operative word, however, is deterrence, which considerably matters in a region where missiles, drones, and attacks on energy infrastructure have demolished the comfortable assumption that wars could remain geographically contained. The three signatories have rightly stressed that the pact is defensive and directed against no particular state. Nor should it be forced into the lazy rhetoric about bloc politics. It might be better understood as an assertion that regional states need greater capacity to provide for their own security without abandoning their relationships with established global partners.

For Pakistan, there is a larger story here.

Pakistan has entered the arrangement after Marka-e-Haq strengthened perceptions of its conventional military credibility and, equally importantly, its capacity for escalation control. It subsequently demonstrated another form of strategic utility during the Iran-US conflict: while Pakistani forces and air-defence capabilities supported Saudi security, Islamabad was simultaneously helping diplomatic efforts to contain a much wider regional war. This combination to deter, reassure and mediate at the same time is becoming Pakistan’s most valuable strategic currency.Punjab Election Analysis

Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif’s public acknowledgement of Field Marshal Asim Munir’s “untiring efforts and utmost dedication” in bringing the agreement to fruition is therefore significant. Modern military diplomacy is not confined to exercises and ceremonial exchanges. At its best, professional military relationships create trust that civilian leadership can translate into durable state arrangements.


The journey to the Makkah Agreement illustrates precisely how military credibility can generate strategic confidence, which in turn produces diplomatic access,

It is also why the pact makes practical sense. Pakistan brings operational experience, trained manpower and tested military institutions. Türkiye contributes an increasingly sophisticated indigenous defence industry and considerable aerospace, naval and drone expertise. Saudi Arabia brings economic weight, strategic geography and growing determination to build a more autonomous security posture.

The trilateral framework had been under discussion for close to a year and follows decades of Pakistan-Saudi defence cooperation and increasingly substantive Pakistan-Türkiye military ties.Geographic Reference

All said and done, for the larger part of its history, Pakistan’s strategic importance was too often discussed in terms of what larger powers could provide Islamabad. That equation is finally changing. From military credibility after Marka-i-Haq to defence deployments, mediation and now Makkah, Pakistan is increasingly being approached for what it can contribute to the security of others. *