CSM reporting: \u00a0Pakistan announced last week that it received a $1.5 billion grant from Saudi Arabia, which it termed a \u201cfriendly gift\u201d and an \u201cunconditional grant.\u201d \u00a0Follow the Money.<\/p>\n
Pakistan and Saudi Arabia have long had warm ties, but the no-strings-attached gift sparked immediate concern from Pakistani journalists, security experts, and opposition politicians, who question whether the grant is part of a behind-the-scenes deal for Pakistan to provide weapons for Syrian rebels.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere are no free lunches in foreign diplomacy,\u201d says Baqir Sajjad, a journalist at Pakistan\u2019s Dawn newspaper, which has published articles questioning the deal.<\/p>\n
The grant was confirmed at a briefing by Pakistan Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif\u2019s advisor on national security and foreign affairs, who also said that Saudi Arabia had agreed to purchase weapons from Pakistan.<\/p>\n
The Pakistan government declined to specify what kind of weapons the Kingdom was looking for and denied that any arms purchased by Saudi Arabia will be sent to Syria\u00a0Pakistan, which has the sixth-largest army in the world, is known as a major arms importer, but it also sells fighter jets, anti-tank missiles, armored personal carriers,\u00a0and small arms to Sri Lanka, Iraq, and Malaysia.<\/p>\n
Ayesha Siddiqa, a defense expert based in Islamabad, says that Saudi Arabia \u2013 who is desperate to counter arch-rival Iran\u2019s support for the Syrian regime and has publicly called for arming Syrian rebels \u2013 may want to buy weapons from Pakistan rather than other countries because Pakistan cannot enforce an agreement about where the arms end up.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf the arms bought from the West were supplied to Syrian rebels and the sellers like the United States or other such countries found out, they would be able impose sanctions on the Saudis,\u201d she says. \u201cBut Pakistan has no such leverage over the Saudis if they violate the agreement\u201d because the government is cash-strapped and worried that US foreign aid will diminish once American troops withdraw from Afghanistan.<\/p>\n
The disclosure of the grant and weapons agreement follows a series of high-level talks between Pakistan and Saudi Arabian officials over the past three months and Pakistan’s break last month from its neutral stance on the Syrian civil war. It said for the first time that the Assad regime should step down.<\/p>\n
There is no proof that Pakistan\u2019s decisions are the direct result of Saudi Arabia\u2019s actions \u2013 or that its arms will reach Syria. Even if they did, \u201cthere are so many arms coming from so many different places,\u201d says Michael Kugelman, a Pakistan scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington in an e-mail. \u201cUnless the level of Pakistani arms shipments reaches some sort of critical mass, I don\u2019t see them being any kind of game-changer for the conflict.\u201d\u00a0At home, Pakistan is struggling with its Sunni-Shiite violence and ongoing strife from the Pakistan Taliban\u2019s insurgency. There were 687 sectarian killings in Pakistan last year, an increase of 22 percent from 2012, according to the Pakistan Institute for Peace Studies. Violence between Sunni Muslims (about 75 percent of the population) and Shiites (15 to 20 percent) has never reached massive levels, but there\u2019s concern that it\u2019s on the rise.<\/p>\n
CSM reporting: \u00a0Pakistan announced last week that it received a $1.5 billion grant from Saudi Arabia, which it termed a \u201cfriendly gift\u201d and an \u201cunconditional grant.\u201d \u00a0Follow the Money. Pakistan and Saudi Arabia have long had warm ties, but the … Continue reading ![\"Arms](\"http:\/\/www.w-t-w.org\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/03\/Arms-to-Syria-300x238.jpg\")
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