Pakistan's Favourite Sport: Betrayal. New Victim: Saudi Arabia

Saudi Arabia is under attack by the Houthis, a group in Yemen backed by Iran. Just weeks ago, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Pakistan signed a pact promising to defend each other. Now that Saudi Arabia is actually being attacked, we can see whether that promise means anything. It also matters to us, because this fight is around the oil routes that India depends on.

The Pact

On 7 August 2026, in the holiest city of Islam, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Pakistan signed a Joint Defence Agreement.

Pakistan is a nuclear-armed state with a military that has ruled the country for more than half its existence.

Turkey is a NATO member with a defence industry that exports drones to half the world.

Saudi Arabia is a wealthy Gulf monarchy with the third-largest defence budget on the planet, sitting on the world's largest oil reserves.

Its central clause holds that an armed attack on any one of the three will be treated as an attack on all. Turkey's foreign minister, Hakan Fidan, called it technically identical to Article 5 of the NATO treaty. The press did the rest, reaching within hours for the label "Islamic NATO."

The comparison flatters the document. NATO is a treaty wrapped around an apparatus: an integrated command, standardised logistics, decades of interoperability built by officers who learned each other's habits. The Makkah pact has none of it: there is no joint command, no permanent combined force, no unified doctrine, no headquarters, not even a ratified text.

What exists is a political commitment, not a war machine. A commitment is only as strong as the willingness to honour it when honouring it becomes costly.

This is not the first time the region has tried collective security on paper. The 1950 Arab League Joint Defence and Economic Co-operation Treaty promised mutual defence among seven Arab states. Four of the seven signatories experienced persistent instability and repeated internal coups. The 2000 GCC Joint Defence Agreement followed a similar pattern: grand language, minimal implementation. The Makkah pact is the latest iteration of a familiar genre.

What Each Party Wanted

Saudi Arabia, exposed during the Iran-Israel-US conflict, wanted insurance that did not depend solely on Washington. It had learned that American protection is conditional, that the president can change his mind. The Makkah pact was Riyadh's hedge against abandonment.

Turkey wanted an institutional framework for projecting influence southward, into the Gulf and the Red Sea, where its defence exports could find new markets.

Pakistan brought something else: a domestic crisis it hoped the pact would help obscure. Its economy is in freefall. Its military is fighting an insurgency in Balochistan and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. Its political class is fractured. A foreign policy triumph in the Gulf would distract from all of it.

The text of the agreement has never been made public. It was not designed to fight a war but to avoid one. Deterrence, as the international thinkers like to call it.

The Framing and the Machinery

Fidan said explicitly that Iran was not in the crosshairs. Pakistan's foreign minister called it "purely defensive in nature." The three states insist it is an "Islamic military alliance," not a "Sunni NATO." The optics are unavoidable anyway. The Houthis are Shia and all three signatories are Sunni-majority, on the other hand Iran backs the Houthis. Everyone knows what this is.

The First Test

Then came the test. On 13 July, Yemeni government forces struck the runway at Sanaa airport to stop an Iranian plane, returning from Khamenei's funeral, from landing. The Houthis blamed Saudi Arabia and launched strikes on Abha airport, then widened the campaign into a maritime blockade on 20 July. By September, the Houthis had swept through Yemen's Red Sea coast, capturing the port city of Mocha on 10 September and Mayun Island in the Bab al-Mandab Strait on 11 September. They launched their heaviest missile and drone attacks against Saudi Arabia in years, setting oil sites ablaze and wounding 73 people. More than 500 people died in the fighting. Saudi Arabia was genuinely attacked. The question of what the pact was worth stopped being theoretical.

Pakistan's answer was close to silence. A foreign ministry spokesperson said there was currently no discussion of a military response. The defence minister had earlier declared that aggression against one was aggression against all three. His own ministry walked the remark back. Pakistan had also signed a bilateral strategic mutual defence agreement with Saudi Arabia back in September 2025, post Operation Sindoor. When the test came, it honoured neither.

Pakistan signed two pacts with Saudi Arabia and honoured neither. Pakistan's foreign policy is intertwined with treachery.

Pakistan's deterrent was never built for Saudi Arabia. Its weapons point at India. Its generals think about the eastern border, not the Red Sea. Asking Pakistan to fight Iran's proxy in Yemen is asking it to fight a war it did not prepare for, on a front it does not care about, for a patron it has already betrayed once.

Iran's Shadow War and the AI Dimension

The Houthis are not acting alone. Iran's Revolutionary Guard has directly directed the Red Sea coast offensive. Multiple Quds Force commanders have entered Yemen to coordinate strikes on Saudi Arabia. The strategy is not new. It is straight out of the IRGC playbook.

With the Strait of Hormuz blockaded, global energy supply is already strained. Closing Bab al-Mandab, or merely threatening to close it, squeezes Saudi oil exports further, drives up prices, and imposes costs on the United States and its allies. Hormuz is the chokepoint Iran guards itself. Bab al-Mandab is the one the Houthis guard. Pressure at both ends at once twists the global energy supply chain into a knot.

Saudi Arabia's East-West Pipeline, the key alternative route bypassing Hormuz, has already been shut down by drone attacks.

And the Houthis are not just fighting with missiles. They are fighting with AI. A threat intelligence report from Anthropic disclosed that a Houthi weapons development team used Claude Code to help develop ballistic missile guidance software, simulate flight trajectories, and diagnose failed test launches within hours. The method is the interesting part. The team ran multiple AI instances simultaneously: one writing code, one doing research, one reviewing the first's output. That is a virtual engineering team, assembled to compensate for a shortage of trained personnel. The reviewing instance plays the role a senior engineer plays in a real programme, checking the work of the one who wrote it. On that measure a non-state group, under Iranian guidance and using Silicon Valley's tools, is outpacing a kingdom that has spent hundreds of billions buying weapons.

The Drone Over Makkah

In mid-September, Saudi Arabia claimed it intercepted a Houthi drone flying toward Makkah. The foreign ministry called it a cowardly terrorist attack and an impermissible red line against the safety of the two holy mosques and pilgrims. The Houthis quickly denied it. A political bureau member posted on X calling it an "old lie." Who is telling the truth is unknown. The political effect has occurred regardless of who is telling the truth.

The entire Muslim world was inflamed, with Syria, Saudi Arabia and others issuing condemnations. Riyadh needs this narrative. Saudi legitimacy is built on guardianship of the holy cities. A custodian who cannot protect them invites questions about his right to rule. But Saudi Arabia also needs to demonstrate that it is protecting Makkah. An intercepted drone, real or fabricated, is a perfect political prop.

A State Named After a Family

The episode exposes something no defence budget can repair. Saudi Arabia lacks the civilisational depth and nationalist cohesion. That is a reserve of loyalty a government can draw on when things go badly. Its civilisation predates its state by millennia. Its nationalism is not a construction of the last century.

Saudi Arabia has no such reserve. It was assembled in 1932 from disparate regions, Najd, Hejaz and Ahsa, under the name of a single family. The country is named after a dynasty, not a people.Its legitimacy rests on two pillars, Wahhabism and American protection, and neither is a substitute for national identity. It is a kingdom of old shot, trying to become a nation state in modern times. No "Saudi" entity exists independent of Makkah, Madinah and Islam.

That is why a claimed threat to Makkah matters so much. The state has no other story to fall back on when its custodianship is questioned. And that is why the Houthis, for all their faults, have something Saudi Arabia does not: a narrative of resistance.

The Sunni Security Cartel

The deeper problem is that the agreement was signed in Makkah, the holiest city in Islam, yet it excludes most Muslim nations. Egypt, the most populous Arab state, is not a member. Iran, the largest Shia state, obviously is not.

This is a Sunni security cartel dressed in religious language, and the dress does not fit. The pact was supposed to demonstrate Islamic solidarity. Its first test exposed the absence of it.

When the Houthis seized Mocha and advanced on Bab al-Mandab, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman called President Trump twice in one day. The first call was to brief him on the deteriorating situation. The second was a direct request: order US strikes on the Houthis. Trump refused. The White House's position was that the US would focus on protecting core national security interests, such as freedom of navigation in the Red Sea, and would empower regional partners to take the lead in managing regional security.

Where Bharat Stands

A significant portion of India's oil comes through Bab al-Mandab, and the Houthis now effectively control that chokepoint. Saudi Aramco has stopped contracted crude oil supplies to Indian refiners until further notice following the attack on the East-West pipeline. Aramco had supplied about 9 percent of India's crude imports since the war began, and it has now halted all supplies through both the Red Sea and the Strait of Hormuz. Indian refiners are scrambling for replacement barrels, and the replacements will come at higher prices. Additionally, US threatening Bharat with 100 percent tariff if we continue opting for Russian Oil.

India has deep ties with Saudi Arabia in energy, remittances and business. Now it must deal with a Shia militia that controls its oil route. India's approach has been careful: express concern, avoid taking sides, protect the oil route.

At the end of the day, it is a recommendation that there must be a maritime force of sorts under the United Nations, much like its peacekeeping forces, which could look into matters such as blockades and maritime terrorism, particularly where a state actor or a non-state actor, by virtue of its proximity to international waters, uses that strategic position to disrupt or block maritime movement and exert pressure on its political opponents, while the rest of the world continues to suffer the wider consequences.

The Abraham Accords

Iran is certainly behind the Houthis. Whether it orchestrated the timing, the funeral flight, the airport strike and the blockade, is less clear. But Iran benefits from every dimension of the crisis. Saudi Arabia is weakened and The US is distracted. Oil prices are increasing.

Whether Saudi Arabia will sign the Abraham Accords is speculation. Trump has linked a Saudi nuclear deal to normalisation with Israel. The White House has said the proposed US-Saudi civil nuclear agreement will not take effect unless Riyadh joins the Abraham Accords. A US administration source said the president's position has not changed. But MBS has privately said he does not personally care about the Palestinian cause, while acknowledging that his people do. According to The Atlantic, MBS told then-Secretary of State Antony Blinken: "Do I care personally about the Palestinian issue? I don't, but my people do, so I need to make sure this is meaningful."

The gap between MBS's private sentiment and Saudi official policy is where the kingdom's future will be decided. If the pact fails to protect the kingdom, if the Houthis keep escalating, if the US stays reluctant to intervene, the calculus could shift. Now it all depends on its Muslim allies, whether they will openly support and defend the Saudis. So far, they have not.