Fatman17
Moderator
Pakistan deploys troops to Saudi Arabia
Pakistan - Middle East Relationship News
- Thread starter ghazi52
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Pakistan deploys troops to Saudi Arabia
ghazi52
THINK TANK: CONSULTANT
- Thread starter
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Pakistan discusses regional developments with Saudi Arabia, Qatar
- Pakistan committed to regional peace, stability: DPM Dar
ghazi52
THINK TANK: CONSULTANT
- Thread starter
- #199
Govt reaffirms Gulf ties, regional peace push
Baqir Sajjad SyedMay 19, 2026
Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif chairs a meeting with Pakistan’s ambassadors to Iran and GCC states.—APP
ISLAMABAD: Pakistan on Monday reaffirmed its commitment to forging stronger economic cooperation with Gulf countries and continuing efforts aimed at promoting peace and stability in the region.
Continuing to play a role in moving diplomatic efforts forward, Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif spoke to Qatari PM Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman bin Jassim Al Thani and met Chinese envoy Jiang Zaidong in Islamabad.
Separately, PM Shehbaz while chairing a meeting with ambassadors to GCC member states and Iran emphasised on importance of the countries in Pakistan’s foreign policy. The meeting covered discussions on the regional and international situation, with particular focus on promoting peace, stability, and economic cooperation in the broader region.
He directed the ambassadors to Iran and GCC countries to work proactively on enhancing bilateral cooperation in trade, investment, energy, people-to-people contacts etc.
LHA4210
Registered Member
Trump asked Muslim leaders to sign peace deal with Israel after Iran war ends
Trump urged leaders of several Arab and other Muslim countries to sign onto the Abraham Accords during a call.
www.axios.com
Trump tells multiple Muslim countries (including Pakistan) during a call he expects them to join the Abraham Accords after the war
President Trump told leaders of several Arab and other Muslim countries during a Saturday conference call that if a deal to end the Iran war is achieved, then he wants their nations to sign peace agreements with Israel, per two U.S. officials with direct knowledge of the call.
Why it matters: Trump's remarks on Israel and the countries signing onto the Abraham Accords during the call signal the next big step he wants to take in the Middle East after the war.
- Trump is aiming mostly at a historic Saudi-Israeli peace agreement, but the current political climate in the region and the upcoming Israeli election make any near-term breakthrough extremely difficult.
Driving the news: On Saturday, Trump held a phone call with the leaders of Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Pakistan, Turkey, Egypt, Jordan and Bahrain to discuss the emerging deal with Iran.
- Leaders including UAE President Mohammed bin Zayed, who has had a more hawkish view on the Iran war, said they support it.
- "They all said, 'We are with you on this deal. And if it doesn't work we will be with you too,'" a U.S. official said.
- Trump told the leaders that after the war with Iran ends he expects all of them who are still not part of the Abraham Accords or don't have peace agreements with Israel to join and normalize relations with the Jewish state, two U.S. officials said.
- The leaders, especially those of Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Pakistan who don't have formal diplomatic relations with Israel, were surprised by Trump's request. "There was silence on the line, and Trump joked and asked if they are still there," one of the U.S. officials said.
- Trump then told the leaders that his envoys Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff will follow up on this issue in the coming weeks.
- He floated the idea of Iran joining the Abraham Accords one day. It would require Tehran to recognize Israel, something it has refused to do for decades. The current Iranian regime sees Israel as an enemy and is committed to its destruction.
- Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), who criticized the emerging deal with Iran and is a leading force in Congress for the expansion of the Abraham Accords, wrote on X on Sunday that he supports Trump's request to the Arab and other Muslim leaders.
- "If in fact as a result of these negotiations to end the Iranian conflict, our Arab and Muslim allies in the region agreed to join the Abraham Accords, it would make this agreement one of the most consequential in the history of the Middle East," he said.
- Graham called on Saudi Arabia and other countries to adhere to Trump's request. "If you refuse to go down this path as suggested by President Trump, it will have severe repercussions for our future relationships and make this peace proposal unacceptable. Further, it would be seen by history as a major miscalculation," he wrote.
- Trump asked bin Salman to join the Abraham Accords during their Oval Office meeting last November. The Saudi crown prince pushed back, and the meeting got tense.
- The Iran war and Saudi Arabia's rift with the UAE have pushed the Kingdom to take a more skeptical and tough position towards Israel's far-right government.
- Saudi officials still demand that Israel commits to an irreversible and time-bound path for a Palestinian state as a condition for them normalizing relations. The Israeli government refuses this.
- Israeli and U.S. officials think Riyadh will not take any steps on this issue ahead of Israel's elections planned for September and before it sees which government is sworn in.
Dalit
Elite Member
The UAE has evidently decided that Pakistan is no longer the partner it once required —but that India is
Middle East
By Giorgio Cafiero, Andreas Krieg
May 28, 2026
Thirty years after the last Arab Maghreb Union summit, the region’s integration failure is still commonly framed as a diplomatic stalemate between Algeria and Morocco. But the deeper problem lies elsewhere. The AMU was never designed to withstand political crises, lacking the institutional mechanisms that allow other regional organizations to function even amid rivalry and distrust. As both governments increasingly pursued bilateral and alternative regional arrangements, the Maghreb’s institutional architecture was gradually hollowed out rather than merely paused. This analysis argues that the AMU did not stall but structurally collapsed — and that reconciliation alone is unlikely to revive a regional framework intentionally built without durable foundations.
In two weeks in April, the United Arab Emirates turned off every channel of its long interdependence with Pakistan.
On April 12, plainclothes officers in Dubai began detaining Pakistani workers — most of them Shi’ite Muslims and many with decades of residence — with the total eventually reaching roughly 15,000. Etihad Airways dismissed 15 Pakistani staff with only 48 hours’ notice. On April 23, the Abu Dhabi Fund for Development (ADFD) demanded that Pakistan immediately repay $1 billion against a $3.45 billion facility long rolled over without fuss. Saudi Arabia stepped in with a $3 billion deposit. The sequence was too synchronized, and too punitive, to read as drift. What Pakistan was watching was the weaponization of a long friendship.
The argument that follows is uncomfortable, but hard to escape. The UAE has evidently decided, over the past 18 months and in particular, since the start of the latest U.S. and Israeli war on Iran, that Pakistan is no longer the partner it once required — but that India is. With a substitute available, Abu Dhabi can afford to coerce, and it is now reaching for every chokepoint of interdependence, including labor, sovereign debt, aviation, and procurement, to try to force Islamabad’s realignment.
The wider lesson is that the UAE is using its regional hub position to extract concessions from partners in a clear demonstration of its power of connectivity. Abu Dhabi is willing to weaponize interdependence to try to get other middle powers to stand firmly with the Emirati cause.
Two Pakistani positions, taken in the space of one year, appear to explain the squeeze. The first was the Strategic Mutual Defense Agreement signed by Pakistan and Saudi Arabia at Al-Yamamah Palace on September 17, 2025, eight days after Israeli strikes on Hamas officials in Doha. The pact treats aggression against either party as aggression against both, with an implicit nuclear ambiguity that Islamabad later played down. For Saudi Arabia, the agreement represented strategic diversification. For Abu Dhabi, increasingly at odds with Riyadh over Yemen, OPEC discipline, and Horn of Africa policy, it read as a defection.
The second was reported Pakistani facilitation of back-channel communications between Washington and Tehran during the worst weeks of the current conflict and the temporary ceasefire framework announced on April 8. To Abu Dhabi, which has absorbed by some accounts more than two thousand Iranian strikes, Pakistan’s neutrality looked less like statecraft than betrayal. “The UAE was shocked that Pakistan did not support them against Iran, and Pakistan was shocked that the UAE was shocked” was how former Pakistani diplomat Hussein Haqqani captured the disconnect.
What followed was not retaliation in the diplomatic sense but the use of every economic and procedural lever the UAE possesses. The labor weapon was the most visible. The roughly 15,000 predominantly Shi’ite deportees were returned to Punjab and Gilgit-Baltistan without notice. Their bank accounts were frozen, and identification numbers deactivated. The debt weapon followed on April 23, when ADFD, for years a quiet stabilizer of Pakistan’s foreign exchange position, demanded $1 billion back. The corporate weapon was Etihad’s mass termination. (The UAE had already withdrawn in January — shortly after a state visit to India by UAE President Mohammed bin Zayed — from a long-discussed deal to operate Islamabad International Airport.)
Viewed from Abu Dhabi, the moves have their own logic. The UAE leadership perceives its longest-standing South Asian security partner to have chosen, in sequence, to align with Riyadh, and to negotiate on behalf of Tehran. There is no other way to explain the migrant policy, which is sectarian sorting conducted through a Gulf airport. Abu Dhabi has concluded that interdependence with Pakistan should now exact behavior, not absorb it. That is a serious shift, and Islamabad does not yet appear to have an answer beyond official denials that its citizens are being singled out.
Coercion of this kind is possible only where substitution is available, and that is the third feature of the new picture. Abu Dhabi has spent the past two years building an ideological alignment with New Delhi that Pakistan cannot replicate. Both governments share a hardline stance on political Islam. Both prize commercial pragmatism over religious solidarity. Both treat Iranian regional influence as a first-order problem. The January New Delhi visit by MBZ produced a $3 billion LNG deal, a letter of intent on a defense partnership, and the quiet end of the Islamabad airport negotiation within weeks.
The emerging trilateral with Israel, encompassing maritime security, drone development and intelligence-sharing, has no comfortable role for a Pakistani military whose deterrence is calibrated against India. The plausible trajectory is one in which Pakistan’s remittance economy, into which roughly two million workers sent home an estimated $8 billion last year, ceases to be politically inert. The uncertainty is whether Abu Dhabi’s tilt to New Delhi is settled, or whether parts of it might be reversed if Tehran and Riyadh cool. The record suggests the former. Substitution, once achieved, is rarely undone.
The strongest counter is that “weaponization” overstates what is, on this reading, a bilateral cooling within a structurally robust relationship. Trade between the two countries has surpassed $10 billion, approximately two million Pakistanis still live in the Emirates, and decades of family wealth and property holdings tie the two economies together. Once the regional temperature drops, ledgers will reopen and the friendship may revert to its long-tested pattern of complaint and accommodation. (Indeed, a Kashmiri journalist wrote on social media on May 19 that the UAE had quietly reached out to Islamabad seeking re-engagement.) However, the synchronization of the April actions, the punitive scale of the labor purge, and the explicitly sectarian sorting of detainees argue for design, not drift. Once interdependence has been used as a weapon, the next negotiation begins from the assumption that it can be used again.
Islamabad’s task now is to try to harden the relationship against the use of interdependence as a weapon. Three priorities stand out. The first is labor diversification: formal mobility agreements with other Gulf states and parts of East Africa and East Asia, to reduce single-market exposure of the remittance economy. The second is reserve adequacy. The April episode showed that a friendly sovereign facility can become a margin call without notice; multilateral cushioning and bilateral swaps with Beijing and Riyadh deserve fresh emphasis. The third is procedural: A discreet channel with Abu Dhabi, aimed at predictability rather than reconciliation, would lower the cost of the next crisis.
Pakistan is the first South Asian state to find out what it means when the wage packet, the sovereign facility, and the work permit are simultaneously available as instruments of pressure. It will likely not be the last.
Middle East
By Giorgio Cafiero, Andreas Krieg
May 28, 2026
Thirty years after the last Arab Maghreb Union summit, the region’s integration failure is still commonly framed as a diplomatic stalemate between Algeria and Morocco. But the deeper problem lies elsewhere. The AMU was never designed to withstand political crises, lacking the institutional mechanisms that allow other regional organizations to function even amid rivalry and distrust. As both governments increasingly pursued bilateral and alternative regional arrangements, the Maghreb’s institutional architecture was gradually hollowed out rather than merely paused. This analysis argues that the AMU did not stall but structurally collapsed — and that reconciliation alone is unlikely to revive a regional framework intentionally built without durable foundations.
In two weeks in April, the United Arab Emirates turned off every channel of its long interdependence with Pakistan.
On April 12, plainclothes officers in Dubai began detaining Pakistani workers — most of them Shi’ite Muslims and many with decades of residence — with the total eventually reaching roughly 15,000. Etihad Airways dismissed 15 Pakistani staff with only 48 hours’ notice. On April 23, the Abu Dhabi Fund for Development (ADFD) demanded that Pakistan immediately repay $1 billion against a $3.45 billion facility long rolled over without fuss. Saudi Arabia stepped in with a $3 billion deposit. The sequence was too synchronized, and too punitive, to read as drift. What Pakistan was watching was the weaponization of a long friendship.
The argument that follows is uncomfortable, but hard to escape. The UAE has evidently decided, over the past 18 months and in particular, since the start of the latest U.S. and Israeli war on Iran, that Pakistan is no longer the partner it once required — but that India is. With a substitute available, Abu Dhabi can afford to coerce, and it is now reaching for every chokepoint of interdependence, including labor, sovereign debt, aviation, and procurement, to try to force Islamabad’s realignment.
The wider lesson is that the UAE is using its regional hub position to extract concessions from partners in a clear demonstration of its power of connectivity. Abu Dhabi is willing to weaponize interdependence to try to get other middle powers to stand firmly with the Emirati cause.
Two Pakistani positions, taken in the space of one year, appear to explain the squeeze. The first was the Strategic Mutual Defense Agreement signed by Pakistan and Saudi Arabia at Al-Yamamah Palace on September 17, 2025, eight days after Israeli strikes on Hamas officials in Doha. The pact treats aggression against either party as aggression against both, with an implicit nuclear ambiguity that Islamabad later played down. For Saudi Arabia, the agreement represented strategic diversification. For Abu Dhabi, increasingly at odds with Riyadh over Yemen, OPEC discipline, and Horn of Africa policy, it read as a defection.
The second was reported Pakistani facilitation of back-channel communications between Washington and Tehran during the worst weeks of the current conflict and the temporary ceasefire framework announced on April 8. To Abu Dhabi, which has absorbed by some accounts more than two thousand Iranian strikes, Pakistan’s neutrality looked less like statecraft than betrayal. “The UAE was shocked that Pakistan did not support them against Iran, and Pakistan was shocked that the UAE was shocked” was how former Pakistani diplomat Hussein Haqqani captured the disconnect.
What followed was not retaliation in the diplomatic sense but the use of every economic and procedural lever the UAE possesses. The labor weapon was the most visible. The roughly 15,000 predominantly Shi’ite deportees were returned to Punjab and Gilgit-Baltistan without notice. Their bank accounts were frozen, and identification numbers deactivated. The debt weapon followed on April 23, when ADFD, for years a quiet stabilizer of Pakistan’s foreign exchange position, demanded $1 billion back. The corporate weapon was Etihad’s mass termination. (The UAE had already withdrawn in January — shortly after a state visit to India by UAE President Mohammed bin Zayed — from a long-discussed deal to operate Islamabad International Airport.)
Viewed from Abu Dhabi, the moves have their own logic. The UAE leadership perceives its longest-standing South Asian security partner to have chosen, in sequence, to align with Riyadh, and to negotiate on behalf of Tehran. There is no other way to explain the migrant policy, which is sectarian sorting conducted through a Gulf airport. Abu Dhabi has concluded that interdependence with Pakistan should now exact behavior, not absorb it. That is a serious shift, and Islamabad does not yet appear to have an answer beyond official denials that its citizens are being singled out.
Coercion of this kind is possible only where substitution is available, and that is the third feature of the new picture. Abu Dhabi has spent the past two years building an ideological alignment with New Delhi that Pakistan cannot replicate. Both governments share a hardline stance on political Islam. Both prize commercial pragmatism over religious solidarity. Both treat Iranian regional influence as a first-order problem. The January New Delhi visit by MBZ produced a $3 billion LNG deal, a letter of intent on a defense partnership, and the quiet end of the Islamabad airport negotiation within weeks.
The emerging trilateral with Israel, encompassing maritime security, drone development and intelligence-sharing, has no comfortable role for a Pakistani military whose deterrence is calibrated against India. The plausible trajectory is one in which Pakistan’s remittance economy, into which roughly two million workers sent home an estimated $8 billion last year, ceases to be politically inert. The uncertainty is whether Abu Dhabi’s tilt to New Delhi is settled, or whether parts of it might be reversed if Tehran and Riyadh cool. The record suggests the former. Substitution, once achieved, is rarely undone.
The strongest counter is that “weaponization” overstates what is, on this reading, a bilateral cooling within a structurally robust relationship. Trade between the two countries has surpassed $10 billion, approximately two million Pakistanis still live in the Emirates, and decades of family wealth and property holdings tie the two economies together. Once the regional temperature drops, ledgers will reopen and the friendship may revert to its long-tested pattern of complaint and accommodation. (Indeed, a Kashmiri journalist wrote on social media on May 19 that the UAE had quietly reached out to Islamabad seeking re-engagement.) However, the synchronization of the April actions, the punitive scale of the labor purge, and the explicitly sectarian sorting of detainees argue for design, not drift. Once interdependence has been used as a weapon, the next negotiation begins from the assumption that it can be used again.
Islamabad’s task now is to try to harden the relationship against the use of interdependence as a weapon. Three priorities stand out. The first is labor diversification: formal mobility agreements with other Gulf states and parts of East Africa and East Asia, to reduce single-market exposure of the remittance economy. The second is reserve adequacy. The April episode showed that a friendly sovereign facility can become a margin call without notice; multilateral cushioning and bilateral swaps with Beijing and Riyadh deserve fresh emphasis. The third is procedural: A discreet channel with Abu Dhabi, aimed at predictability rather than reconciliation, would lower the cost of the next crisis.
Pakistan is the first South Asian state to find out what it means when the wage packet, the sovereign facility, and the work permit are simultaneously available as instruments of pressure. It will likely not be the last.
Dalit
Elite Member
In other words, the UAE has done permanent damage and the mistrust won't disappear. It is better for the Emiratis to continue focusing on their new bed partner India.
The UAE quietly reaching out to Islamabad seeking re-engagement is a futile exercise now.
The UAE quietly reaching out to Islamabad seeking re-engagement is a futile exercise now.
hussain0216
Elite Member
Pakistan will not trust the Emirates, frankly no one trusts them at the moment
If they want to choose Jews and Hindus and friends then they are worthless, they have destroyed their own position in the Arab and Muslim world and needlessly created multiple enemies
Never allow a quite reproach from the Emirates, if they want to talk, then we want solid anti Indian actions from them
Watandar
Trusted Member
The UAE's attack on Pakistan via debt, migrant labor, sponsorship of militancy and alignment with India is unprecedented and also unprovoked. The Emirates has chosen poorly in foreign policy ever since MBZ became its leader and pissing off Saudi, Iran and Pakistan simultaneously isn't statecraft, its arrogance and stupidity.
Pakistan should strike back at this uppity minnow by aggressively targeting Jebel Ali port and attracting international traffic to its own ports.
Pakistan should strike back at this uppity minnow by aggressively targeting Jebel Ali port and attracting international traffic to its own ports.
Hazard
Registered Member
In my opinion, Pak should fully prepare to send this Cancer back to Stone Age.
The best part? We can easily do it, and no one will come to their aid. But then again if our ruling elites were patriotic, they wouldn't have billions invested in UAE and be subservient to these pathetic excuses of humans.
The best part? We can easily do it, and no one will come to their aid. But then again if our ruling elites were patriotic, they wouldn't have billions invested in UAE and be subservient to these pathetic excuses of humans.
Dalit
Elite Member
The Emiratis yearn for an obedient and slave Bakistan. They are stunned how Pakistan fulfilled the role of a mediator and sigened a defence pact with the Saudis.
PakistanLVR
Registered Member
I’m actually not upset at UAE move. For years all those beghairet lollywood types do their unIslamic behavior in Dubai like holding the HUM tv awards where God knows what filthy behavior goes on and with whom.
I’m also leaning towards the above paragraphs where it focuses on UAE and Indias strategic relationship. Why do I get a strong feeling the Indians more than likely nudged the Emiratis towards this path, or tactically encouraged. The Hindus are zero-sum people. In their minds, Pakistan loss = Indias win. They are obsessed with Pakistan to where it’s interfering their own well being.
I was reading the comments on SoS Rubios visit to India and the of course the Indians even those sitting in the U.S. basically focused on India Supapowa disinformation campaign while issuing insults to the U.S. and SoS Rubio.
One comment jumped out on me about Indians obsession that an American commenters pointed out, that you can make the Indians very happy if you brought up Pakistan in any negative manner and it would delight the Indians policymakers.
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