Barely hours after Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Türkiye signed their new mutual defence agreement in Mecca, Pakistan’s Defence Minister Khawaja Asif gave the emerging alliance something its official text had carefully avoided: an enemy.

Asif called for Muslim countries to unite against Israel and advocated a united military front, arguing that the threat posed by the Jewish state extended beyond Palestine to the Muslim world as a whole.

Pakistan has never recognised Israel and Pakistani politicians have frequently adopted strongly anti-Israel and strongly anti-semitic positions. What makes Asif’s latest intervention different is that it comes immediately after Islamabad entered a potentially historic collective defence arrangement with Saudi Arabia and Türkiye.

The Mecca Joint Defence Agreement brings together three of the most important Sunni-majority states in the world, with a combined population of around 380 million. Its central provision states that an armed attack against one member will be treated as an attack against all three.

On paper, it remains a defensive pact directed against nobody in particular. Pakistan already appears interested in giving it a much larger purpose.  Islamabad has repeatedly advocated stronger military coordination between Muslim countries, and Asif himself has spoken about the need for Muslim states to develop collective security arrangements.

The Mecca pact gives this ambition a convincing institutional foundation. Pakistan whose has only its army, chinese weaponry and its nuclear weaponry to offer, turns what should have been a defensive pact against Iran attacking Saudi Arabia into a united muslim enterprise against Israel and India.

Türkiye contributes NATO’s second-largest military, extensive combat experience and an increasingly sophisticated domestic defence industry. Saudi Arabia brings financial power, enormous defence expenditure and unparalleled political weight in the Arab and Islamic worlds.

Pakistan brings something neither possesses: nuclear weapons. It also possesses one of the Muslim world’s largest professional militaries and decades of defence cooperation........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)