As the old maxim goes, the enemy of your enemy is your friend. But what would you say when your friend starts courting your enemy? How would you handle a gratuitous test coming your way, especially with your hands full, already, with hostility from your enemy?
Pakistan was confronted with precisely that kind of a dilemma on its diplomatic front while dealing with a serious threat to its territorial integrity from ‘arch-enemy’ India.
Pakistan was posed an acute diplomatic embarrassment—one of its kind in the living memory of most Pakistanis—by none other than the affluent ‘brotherly’ state of UAE, where millions of Pakistanis are expatriate workers. More, Pakistan has only recently been the beneficiary of billions of dollars pledged by the Emiratis as a bailout for its hard-pressed economy badly in need of foreign assistance. A more broad-based economic cooperation is also in the works.
However, this facts-on-ground couldn’t obscure the diplomatic dilemma masked in the UAE government inviting the Indian external affairs minister as a guest of honour to the 46th Conference of foreign ministers of the OIC—Organisation of Islamic Cooperation—hosted by it.
Pakistan felt slighted and hurt that ‘brotherly’ UAE hadn’t thought it necessary to consult it on the sensitivity of the issue. It also felt deeply betrayed because the diplomatic salvo came at a crunch time in Pakistan’s tense ties with India.
The February 14 bloody incident at Pulwama, in Kashmir—in which at least 40 Indian Forces were killed—degenerated into a shooting conflict from the previously war-of-words between India and Pakistan on February 26, when New Delhi claimed to have blasted, from the air, an alleged training camp of Jaish-e-Muhammad at Balakot, deep inside Pakistan’s Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province.
The following day, February 27, there was a dogfight between India and Pakistan. An Indian jet was hit and a Wing Commander was captured.
There was plenty of gung-ho optics and commentary for Pakistanis to celebrate the capture of the pilot, but there was a lot of heart-burning at the same time, at brotherly UAE’s refusal to rescind their invitation to Indian FM Sushma Swaraj, to grace the OIC conclave in Abu Dhabi.
Pakistanis have a long memory on India’s persistent efforts, over the last half-a-century, to gatecrash into OIC and back-stabbing of Pakistan on this question by some Arab states with a soft heart for India. There’s a history of India seeking to embarrass Pakistan by consistently demanding some sort of status in OIC.
OIC was founded, back in 1969, when Israel had made an abortive attempt to take control of Masjid-e-Aqsa—the third holiest shrine to Muslims—in its occupied Jerusalem. India had then asked for full membership or observer status at OIC. The Indian demand emanated from its claim that it had a Muslim minority that outnumbered the populations of several of OIC’s 56-member-states combined. Even today, India has the second largest population of Muslims in its confines, after Indonesia.
But Pakistan had blunted and parried the Indian attempt to get a foothold into the OIC camp by arguing that OIC was a grouping of only Muslim states, where political control was in the hands of Muslims. Its threat to boycott OIC at its genesis had shut the door on India.
But what had worked in 1969 apparently didn’t work in 2019. Pakistan’s failure to coax or cajole UAE to keep Sushma away from the Islamic FMs conference was an embarrassment hard to stomach. In the end, Pakistan decided to stay away from the Abu Dhabi conclave—the first time, ever, that Pakistan, a founding member, was conspicuous by its absence at an OIC FM conclave.
What incensed the Pakistanis was the insensitivity of the rulers of UAE playing host to the FM of a country that Pakistan accused of being an ‘aggressor’ against it and violating its territory by despatching its aircraft into Pakistani territory.
To many in Pakistan, it’s a bizarre spectacle that on the one hand their government of the day occupied high moral ground by returning to India its captured pilot.
But on the other, it cut a sorry figure in its diplomatic tightrope-walking to persuade a brotherly state—with whom it has a multi-faceted and multi-dimensional relationship—to review what it thought was an ill-timed and ill-advised initiative to play host to Pakistan’s ‘enemy number-one.’
Pakistan, on PM Imran Khan’s watch, may have averted—at least for now—a war of limitless and unseen propensities with India by a whisker. But many an angry critic of Imran fault him for being unwittingly outmanoeuvred on the diplomatic front by, of all, a supposedly ‘brotherly’ fellow Muslim state. He may have to learn, the hard way, that in inter-state relations, the only permanency is to self-interest.
Karamatullah K Ghori
Former Pakistani diplomat
Email: K_K_ghori@hotmail.com