Opinion Saudi Arabia’s political clout in Pakistan

One of Musharraf's advisers has declared that 'just one phone call from Saudi Arabia will stop all the non-sense' about sending the General to prison.

September 7, 2009 02:16 PM IST First published on: Sep 7, 2009 at 02:16 PM IST

AMIDST the clamour in Pakistan to put the former president Pervez Musharraf on trial for his many unconstitutional acts,one of his advisers Mushahid Hussain declared that ‘just one phone call from Saudi Arabia will stop all the non-sense’ about sending the General to the prison house.

Hussain is a former editor who morphed himself into a politico and served many masters including Nawaz Sharif. Hussain has not lost any of his reputation for utter clarity (bordering on the cynical) and the capacity to cut through a complex debate.

The House of Saud has not yet dialled Islamabad. It has done one better. It has summoned all the top figures of Pakistan to discuss the latest political crisis. Among those who serenaded themselves in Riyadh last week were Rehman Malik,a close adviser to Pakistan President Asif Ali Zardari and Gen. Musharraf himself. Sharif heads for Saudi Arabia this week.

The latest crisis follows Sharif’s campaign to have Gen. Musharraf tried and sent to prison. Sharif wants revenge for Musharraf’s coup against him in October 1999. Zardari,who is in power because of a deal between his late wife Benazir and Musharraf,has no reason to ask the judiciary to revisit that mutually beneficial understanding. We don’t

know where the current Army Chief,Gen Ashfaq Kayani,stands. Will he protect his predecessor or hang him?

It is into this minefield that Saudi Arabia has boldly stepped into.

This is certainly not the first time. In the last two decades,Saudi power in Islamabad has grown enormously. More than the US President,it is the Saudi King who is now the real arbiter of Pakistan’s domestic politics.

After Musharraf’s coup against Sharif,the Saudis got the former prime minister out of prison and gave him political asylum. When Sharif broke his promise not to play politics and landed in Pakistan,the Saudis lifted him right back from the airport tarmac. When the US was brokering a deal between Musharraf and Benazir,the Saudis put

Sharif back in play against the wishes of President George Bush and Musharraf.

That Saudi Arabia can exercise such influence in a country of more than 160 million people with a powerful army equipped with nuclear weapons should tell us two things about Pakistan.

One. For all the shared history and culture,the Pakistani state is very unlike ours. As a ‘frontier state’ (some Pakistani liberals might call it a ‘rentier state’),Pakistan is organised on a different set of rules. In a frontier state,there is no separation between the internal and the external. The frontier and rentier states deal with external benefactors with a kind of ease that normal states can never imagine. They don’t define national sovereignty in opposition to the external world.

Two. If the House of Saud is now an integral part of Pakistani politics,it makes sense for Delhi to treat Riyadh as a neighbour and engage it intensively and on a strategic basis.

(C. Raja Mohan is currently the Henry A. Kissinger Chair in Foreign Policy and International Affairs at the Library of Congress,Washington DC).