For years one of the most heard refrains behind the scenes in the halls of power in Washington was: “Why can’t the Arabs take the initiative to defend themselves?” This after more than a decade of occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan by the United States, and the exorbitant costs both in American lives and money. Taking this advice, the Arab Gulf states are now doing just that, first with the Saudi military intervention in Yemen to restore the government of President Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi to power, and then to try to overthrow the government of President Bashar Assad in Syria with the help of Turkey and Qatar.
The World Health Organization estimates that 648 have died already and 2,191 were wounded in the battles between the Houthis rebels and forces loyal to Hadi. Cars line up for hours to fill up at filling stations that still manage to get gasoline, and thousands of Yemenis have fled the main cities to take shelter in their ancestral villages, or even to attempt the dangerous crossing of the Gulf of Aden to reach Djibouti and Somalia. Which is ironic in the extreme given that for many years the flow of immigration had always been in the opposite direction: Africans coming to Yemen to try for a better life in the Arabian Peninsula.
A setback the Saudis have suffered was the decision of Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif to refer the decision to send or not Pakistani troops to assist the Saudis in Yemen to his Parliament for a decision. The Pakistani Parliament decided to only send troops if Saudi territory was threatened by Yemeni forces, leaving the Saudis and the UAE astonished at such a betrayal. After all, more than three million Pakistanis have worked in the Gulf for decades, sending money back home, critical to maintaining the country’s creaky economy. In addition, Saudi Arabia gave Pakistan a $1.5 billion interest-free loan last year to strengthen its international reserves and to curb the depreciation of the national currency. And we cannot forget that the Kingdom gave political asylum to Sharif when he was ousted as prime minister in 1999 by Gen. Pervez Musharraf. Sharif returned to Pakistan only in 2008.
The State Minister of Foreign Affairs of the United Arab Emirates, Anwar Gargash, fumed online that the decision of the Pakistani Parliament was “contradictory ... dangerous and unexpected.” He added that Pakistan had to “decide in favor of its strategic relations with the Gulf Cooperation Council or would pay a heavy price.”
It is clear that Pakistan has its own strategic interests, and that being a neighbor of Iran, and with a population that is 30 percent Shiite, it has to be careful not to incite sectarian strife at home or irritate the Iranians unnecessarily. But Pakistan has a long tradition of providing troops to defend Gulf countries as the correspondent Tom Hussein of the McClatchy newspaper chain recently noted in an analysis. According to him, Pakistan sent troops to help defend Saudi Arabia in the 1960s during the civil war in Yemen; sent thousands of troops to the Kingdom and other Gulf countries during the war between Iran and Iraq in the 1980s, and again in 1990 after Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait. In return, the Gulf countries have always given a lot of jobs to Pakistanis, and in 1998 provided 50,000 barrels of crude oil per day to Pakistan for two years after Pakistan suffered western sanctions for conducting nuclear bomb tests.
A victory for Saudi Arabia was the passage by the UN Security Council on April 13 of resolution 2216 calling for an end of the violence in Yemen by the Houthis; the withdrawal of Houthis from all areas they had taken, including in the capital Sanaa; that the Houthis stop any provocation or threat to neighboring states, including acquiring surface-to-surface missiles, and imposed an arms embargo on the Houthis and the forces of the former President Ali Abdullah Saleh, who has allied himself with the Houthis.
Saudi Arabia is also reportedly taking the lead in trying to find a solution to another conflict in the region: The prolonged civil war in Syria. No one can anticipate with certainty the outcome of this new initiative taken by Gulf countries in terms of intervening in Yemen and Syria. But what critics can no longer say is that the Gulf Arabs are depending only on the Americans to solve their problems. Those days are gone. Driven by the nuclear deal arrived at between the West and Iran, the Gulf countries are not waiting to see what will happen with a stronger Iran free of sanctions.
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The writer is a Saudi journalist based in Brazil.
