Congratulations are owed first, and they should be said plainly. The Mecca Joint Defence Agreement, signed on August 7 between Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and Turkiye, is a genuine strategic achievement, and it belongs to Pakistan as a nation to its diplomats, its military leadership, and a state that has finally shown it can build strategic architecture on its own terms. An “attack on one is an attack on all” clause binding Islamabad to Riyadh and Ankara is the kind of strategic depth this country has lacked for decades. Its effects will not stay confined to defence ministries. Capital tends to follow security guarantees; investment, trade corridors, and industrial partnerships trail the flag once the flag has proven it can be trusted. The economic dividends of this pact should, in time, be as real as the military ones.

But precisely because the door west and into the Gulf has swung open this wide, it is worth asking what Pakistan intends to walk through it with. The eastern border remains what it has been for years under the current government in New Delhi: hostile, unyielding, offering no real window for trade or normalisation. If the east stays shut, the only rational posture left for the country is to look west and act west not only diplomatically and militarily, as the Mecca pact proves Pakistan now can, but physically, through infrastructure that makes the west reachable in more than name.

There is a single-point agenda here that deserves the full weight of the state behind it precisely because it is large enough, slow enough, and politically contested enough within Pakistan’s own bureaucracy to require a champion with real institutional weight. That project is a fast-tracked, dual-carriageway railway line, built with China: an upgraded ML-1 running Karachi to Peshawar, followed by the long-delayed Uzbekistan–Afghanistan–Pakistan corridor extending that same track from Peshawar to Tashkent. Successive governments have never demonstrated a serious, sustained commitment to securing Chinese backing for this rail link, standing in sharp contrast to the aggressive rollout of motorway networks that every........

© The Friday Times