Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and the Quiet Abandonment of Kashmir
Between Riyadh and Rawalpindi, Kashmir’s cause is being managed, not defended
Saudi Arabia will not bleed for Kashmir. Riyadh has made that brutally clear over the past decade, and Pakistan’s military civil establishment has just as clearly decided to live with it, with a notable and brief exception when Imran Khan’s government tried to push the envelope. The Kingdom’s pivot toward India, and its studied “neutrality” on Kashmir, is not a moral accident. It is the logical outcome of a geoeconomic realignment in which India has become indispensable to Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030, and Pakistan has become a chronic supplicant that, apart from one short lived challenge under Khan, has not dared to test the limits of Saudi patience.
What makes this story more uncomfortable is not that Saudi Arabia has chosen petrodollars over piety. The harder truth is that Pakistan’s establishment, dominated by unelected power centers rather than any one elected leader, has quietly accepted this choice, trading away meaningful diplomatic pressure on Kashmir in exchange for bailouts, security guarantees, and the illusion of Islamic solidarity. Imran Khan’s brief attempt to call out this arrangement only highlighted how entrenched that system is.
From “Muslim Ummah” To “Internal Matter”
For decades, Pakistani diplomacy rested on a comforting assumption. Because Saudi Arabia is the self appointed leader of the Muslim world, custodian of the holy mosques, and patron of pan Islamic forums like the OIC, it would ultimately back Pakistan on Kashmir as a Muslim cause. That premise has been dismantled in slow motion since the end of the Cold War and collapsed altogether after 2019, just as Khan was trying to internationalise the Kashmir issue more aggressively than his predecessors.
When India revoked Article 370 in August 2019 and stripped Jammu and Kashmir of its special constitutional status, Islamabad under Khan expected Riyadh to lead an Islamic backlash. Instead, Saudi Arabia and the UAE issued carefully hedged statements treating the move as an internal Indian decision and urging restraint on “both sides.” In practice, that meant endorsing the Indian line that Kashmir is a domestic and bilateral dispute, not an international Muslim cause.
Analysts tracking Gulf policy described Saudi Arabia’s posture as “neutrality,” a term that sounds even handed but, in the context of Pakistan’s expectations, amounted to a stark downgrade. Riyadh did not call for self determination, did not demand reversal of Article 370, and did not mobilize the OIC for more than formulaic communiqués. An Al Jazeera analysis at the time framed the question bluntly. Why had Saudi Arabia and the UAE failed to condemn India over Kashmir despite their historic ties to Pakistan.
The answer lay in a structural shift already underway. As one Indian commentary put it with unconcealed satisfaction, much to Pakistan’s dismay and India’s delight, Saudi Arabia was now treating Kashmir as a matter on which it would not take Islamabad’s side against New Delhi. That was the new baseline, and the events of 2020 would show just how costly it was for Pakistan, even under a relatively assertive leader like Khan, to question it.
The 6 Billion Dollar Leash
To understand why Pakistan’s establishment has swallowed this shift, one has to follow the money. In October 2018, as Pakistan lurched into yet another balance of payments crisis created over decades by earlier regimes, Prime Minister Imran Khan flew to Riyadh. He returned with what was widely described as a 6 billion dollar rescue package. The breakdown was simple and brutal.
3 billion dollars as a direct deposit into Pakistan’s foreign exchange reserves.
A 3 billion dollar oil facility on deferred payment, effectively allowing Islamabad to import Saudi oil on credit.
For a state perpetually flirting with default, this was not generosity. It was leverage, built on vulnerabilities that long pre dated Khan’s tenure. Pakistan’s foreign reserves rose overnight, bolstering the rupee and giving the new government breathing space. But the price became clear less than a year later, when Khan’s team tried to push the OIC beyond its comfort zone on Kashmir.
When Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi, reflecting the Khan government’s more outspoken line, publicly demanded in August 2020 that the OIC convene a foreign ministers’ meeting on Kashmir and warned that Pakistan might look for alternatives if Riyadh refused, he was not speaking as a rogue minister. He was voicing a growing sense in Pakistan that the Muslim ummah had abandoned Kashmir and giving expression to Khan’s narrative that Pakistan should not simply remain silent for fear of losing cheques. Riyadh’s response was swift and surgical. Saudi Arabia asked Pakistan to immediately repay 1 billion dollars of the 3 billion dollar deposit and quietly let the 3.2 billion dollar deferred oil facility lapse without renewal.
Islamabad scrambled to meet the demand. China stepped in with a 1 billion dollar loan to allow Pakistan to pay back Riyadh. In parallel, the Saudi oil facility, which had been propping up Pakistan’s fuel import bill, simply disappeared. A German media report was blunt. Pakistan’s more assertive Kashmir stance was risking its Arab allies, with the Saudi recall a clear warning of how far Riyadh was prepared to go.
The symbolism was devastating. When a Pakistani government finally dared to push Saudi Arabia on Kashmir, it was not the OIC charter that spoke, but the ledger. Loans, not loyalties, structured the response.
When The Army Chief Went To Riyadh
The real story of that 2020 crisis, however, is not Qureshi’s defiance or Khan’s rhetoric. It is what happened next. To repair the damage, Pakistan did not send the prime minister who had raised Kashmir at the UN or a strengthened civilian foreign policy team. It sent the Army Chief.
General Qamar Javed Bajwa’s August 2020 visit to Saudi Arabia was explicitly described by regional think tanks as damage control aimed at resetting ties after Qureshi’s outburst. He met senior Saudi officials, including the military leadership, to reassure them that Pakistan would not allow the relationship to be derailed by public criticism over Kashmir. The message to Riyadh was clear. The Pakistani military, not the civilian leadership that had taken a bolder line on Kashmir, remained the true guarantor of the relationship and understood the hierarchy of interests.
Analysts at regional and Western centers noted that this episode exposed the asymmetry of the partnership. There is a Pakistan dependent on Saudi money and Gulf remittances, and a Saudi Arabia increasingly confident of its ability to punish non compliance without jeopardizing its own strategic interests. Pakistani commentators described Riyadh as an albatross around Pakistan’s neck, arguing that the country’s ruling elite had accepted a relationship in which Saudi preferences trumped Pakistan’s core foreign policy priorities. For many of Khan’s supporters, the episode confirmed something else. Whenever an elected government tried to recalibrate that relationship, the real power centers rushed in to reassure Riyadh that nothing fundamental would change.
The deeper conclusion was even more damning for the permanent establishment than for any one elected leader. If Pakistan’s military leadership was prepared to move swiftly to placate Riyadh after a relatively mild public complaint on Kashmir, how likely was it ever to risk the relationship for sustained, hard line advocacy. The answer has played out in the years since. Islamabad continues to raise Kashmir in multilateral forums, but it has conspicuously avoided direct confrontation with Saudi Arabia over the Kingdom’s pro India neutrality, especially once Khan was removed.
India From Oil Customer To Strategic Pillar
To see why Riyadh calculates it can afford to ignore Pakistan’s sensitivities, including those voiced during the Khan period, one has to look at the other side of the ledger, India. The economic transformation of India Saudi ties over the past decade has been nothing short of extraordinary.
By 2023 and 2024, bilateral trade had climbed into the low to mid 40 billion dollar range, with India among Saudi Arabia’s top trading partners. Saudi Arabia emerged as India’s third largest crude oil supplier, providing a significant share of India’s crude imports. India, in turn, became a major market not just for Saudi oil but for petrochemicals, fertilizers, and, increasingly, investment capital.
Key pillars of this partnership include
Energy interdependence, with long term crude supply contracts and discussions on joint strategic petroleum reserves that give Saudi barrels sustained access to one of the world’s fastest growing energy markets.
Investment flows, as Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund and Aramco target large stakes in Indian infrastructure, technology, and energy projects.
Vision 2030 linkages, in which India is woven into Saudi plans to diversify into non oil sectors such as renewable energy, infrastructure, tourism, and digital services.
Indian and Gulf analysts note that the relationship has moved beyond transactionalism, with Saudi Arabia now treating India as a long term strategic pillar in Asia rather than just a customer. The Gulf as a whole has emerged as India’s most important strategic partner, with Gulf Cooperation Council trade with India exceeding 160 billion dollars and India’s exports to the Gulf rising sharply in recent years.
This economic gravity is reinforced by demographics. Millions of Indian workers live in the Gulf, including more than 2 million in Saudi Arabia alone, sending home remittances that bolster India’s external account. While Pakistan also has a substantial diaspora in the Kingdom, the sheer scale of Indian labor, combined with India’s domestic market and technological capacity, gives New Delhi a qualitatively different weight in Riyadh’s calculations.
From Riyadh’s vantage point, the choice is straightforward. There is a more than 40 billion dollar trade relationship, major investment pipelines, and a key role in Vision 2030 on one side, and a crisis ridden economy and 6 billion dollar bailouts on the other. Against that backdrop, alienating India over Pakistan’s Kashmir demands makes little strategic or economic sense, no matter who sits in the Prime Minister’s House in Islamabad.
IMEC Versus CPEC Two Corridors, Two Futures
The India Middle East Europe Economic Corridor, announced at the New Delhi G20 summit in 2023, crystallizes this logic into infrastructure. The project envisions a multimodal corridor of rail, ports, and digital cables linking India to the Arabian Peninsula and on to Europe, with Saudi Arabia and the UAE as central hubs. The United States and European Union have explicitly backed this corridor as an alternative to China’s Belt and Road Initiative.
For Saudi Arabia, the corridor offers
A role as a logistics and energy hub connecting Asia to Europe.
Partnerships with Western and Indian firms in transport, green hydrogen, and digital infrastructure.
A diversification of strategic dependency away from exclusive reliance on China or the United States.
Pakistan finds itself on the outside of this architecture. Its flagship project, the China Pakistan Economic Corridor, anchors it in Beijing’s orbit but does not connect it to the US India Europe axis that the new corridor represents. Analysts contrasting the two describe them as competing geoeconomic visions, one centered on China and the Arabian Sea, the other on India and the Mediterranean. Saudi Arabia is aligning with the latter, not the former.
In that contest, Pakistan’s leverage on Riyadh shrinks further. The more that Saudi Arabia’s trade routes, data flows, and energy exports are tied to India centered corridors, the less willing it will be to jeopardize those ties over Kashmir. Pakistan’s close relationship with China cannot compensate for that, because the issue is not just capital or arms. It is the structure of global connectivity in which Riyadh sees its future.
The Defense Pact Security Without Solidarity
If economics explains why Saudi Arabia has moved closer to India, security explains why Pakistan has not pushed back harder, regardless of which party holds office. The Pakistan Saudi security relationship is long standing and deep. It dates back to a 1967 defense cooperation agreement and was formalized through a 1982 Joint Defense Protocol that paved the way for large Pakistani troop deployments in the Kingdom. At various points, up to 20,000 Pakistani soldiers have been stationed in Saudi Arabia, training Saudi forces and guarding sensitive installations.
In recent years, this relationship has been upgraded rather than downgraded. By 2025, Islamabad and Riyadh concluded a Strategic Mutual Defense Agreement that many commentators described as having a collective defense character. While the exact wording differs from NATO’s Article 5, public reporting and expert analyses converge on a key idea. An attack on either country will be treated as an attack on both, with commitments to joint training, intelligence sharing, and defense production cooperation.
Regional and Western think tank papers argue that this pact embeds Pakistan more firmly in a Gulf centric security architecture that still relies on US guarantees but increasingly looks to partnerships with regional powers like Pakistan and, in some domains, India. Pakistan’s nuclear status, combined with its large professional army, gives it leverage. But that leverage is also a trap.
The trap is simple. The more Pakistan’s security establishment binds its future to Saudi Arabia through defense pacts and troop deployments, the less room it retains to confront Riyadh on political issues like Kashmir. When your soldiers stand guard near someone else’s oil fields and holy sites, and your financial system depends on their deposits and remittances, your margin for diplomatic defiance narrows dramatically. This institutional reality applied just as much during Khan’s tenure as before and after it, and often ran counter to his more confrontational instincts on Kashmir.
Riyadh knows this. Islamabad’s permanent establishment knows it too, and that is precisely why the army chief, not the prime minister who was winning applause at the UN for his Kashmir speeches, was dispatched to paper over the 2020 rift.
OIC, Kuala Lumpur, And The Aborted Alternative
One might argue that Pakistan could have counter balanced Saudi Arabia by aligning with a different coalition within the Muslim world. For a moment in 2019, it tried, and that moment came under Imran Khan. The Kuala Lumpur Summit, championed by Malaysia’s Mahathir Mohamad and Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, was envisioned as a platform for a non Arab Islamic bloc including Turkey, Malaysia, Qatar, Iran, and Pakistan. Kashmir was high on their agenda, and the initiative implicitly challenged Saudi UAE dominance over Muslim political discourse.
Khan initially embraced the summit, in line with his broader narrative of an independent foreign policy and Muslim unity on principles rather than chequebooks. Turkish and Malaysian media hailed it as a strategic realignment that would allow Pakistan to raise Kashmir without Saudi vetoes. Then Riyadh intervened. Reports from multiple outlets indicate that Saudi Arabia warned Pakistan of severe economic consequences, including potential restrictions on Pakistani workers in the Kingdom, if Khan went ahead.
Khan backed down, under enormous pressure from within the state and from Gulf capitals. Pakistan withdrew at the last minute, leaving Erdoğan and Mahathir to rail against India’s Kashmir policies without Pakistani representation. The episode was widely read as proof of Islamabad’s diplomatic subservience to Riyadh. It also revealed how brittle the idea of a non Arab Islamic alternative was. Without Pakistan, the Kuala Lumpur axis could not credibly replace the OIC as a platform for Kashmir, and without institutional backing at home, even a popular prime minister could not break with decades of dependency overnight.
Inside Pakistan, critics saw this as a historic missed opportunity. Yet many of Khan’s supporters read it differently. They argued that he had at least tried to imagine a different alignment and had been yanked back by the same entrenched establishment that has always preferred Saudi comfort to strategic risk. Picking a fight with Saudi Arabia and the UAE over a summit was not something a single elected government, already battling economic crisis and domestic opposition, could pursue without broader institutional buy in.
India’s Parallel Courtship Of The Gulf
While Pakistan oscillated between caution and brief flashes of assertiveness under Khan, India moved methodically. New Delhi’s Link West policy, articulated over the last decade, has focused on deepening economic, energy, and defense ties with the Gulf Cooperation Council states. That policy has had three pillars.
Energy and investment, locking in long term oil and gas supplies while inviting Gulf sovereign funds into Indian infrastructure and technology projects.
Security cooperation, expanding naval exercises, intelligence cooperation on terrorism and piracy, and, increasingly, defense exports to Gulf partners.
Diaspora diplomacy, with regular high profile engagement with Indian communities in the Gulf, portraying them as bridges rather than burdens.
Saudi Arabia has been central to this effort. Joint statements in 2019, 2023, and 2025 repeatedly describe the relationship as a strategic partnership, with institutional mechanisms such as the Strategic Partnership Council and ministerial committees overseeing defense, political, and economic cooperation. Indian briefing documents highlight Saudi support for India’s stance on cross border terrorism and note with satisfaction that Riyadh now routinely calls for bilateral India Pakistan dialogue rather than internationalizing Kashmir.
Western and Gulf policy papers go further. One Gulf Research Center study describes the Gulf states as unexpected facilitators in the India Pakistan conflict, noting that their economic interests and security partnerships increasingly align them with India’s preference for stability and the status quo rather than Pakistan’s quest to reopen the Kashmir dispute. In other words, the Gulf is not a neutral stage on which India and Pakistan compete. It is a theater in which India has quietly out performed Pakistan and redefined the rules, while occasional Pakistani leaders who tried to rewrite the script, like Khan, were hemmed in by their own state’s structural weaknesses.
Pakistan’s Establishment Guardian Or Broker
All of this leaves Pakistan’s military civil establishment in an uncomfortable position. At home, it cannot admit that Saudi Arabia has effectively accepted India’s framing of Kashmir as a bilateral issue and an internal matter, or that Riyadh’s investments and defense ties with India now matter more than Pakistani sensitivities. Internationally, it cannot afford to rupture ties with the Kingdom over a cause that brings no immediate financial dividend.
So the establishment performs a balancing act that borders on duplicity. On the one hand, it continues to present Kashmir as the jugular vein of Pakistan, mobilizing public sentiment and keeping alive the narrative of an unfinished Partition. On the other hand, it quietly accepts Saudi Arabia’s neutrality and works behind closed doors to ensure that no Pakistani move on Kashmir seriously threatens Riyadh’s economic or strategic interests. When a sitting prime minister tried to push back against that pattern, he was first isolated and then ultimately removed by a combination of domestic and external pressures.
The 2024 joint statement between Pakistan and Saudi Arabia illustrates this duality in the post Khan era. Islamabad secured a reference to outstanding issues between Pakistan and India, especially the Jammu and Kashmir dispute, and to the importance of dialogue to resolve them. At first glance, this looked like progress, because Kashmir was named. But the wording mirrored India’s long standing insistence on bilateral dialogue, not third party mediation or self determination. Riyadh had given Pakistan symbolic language while conceding nothing that might upset New Delhi, and there was no leader in Islamabad with the mandate or inclination Khan once had to challenge that.
Pakistani critics increasingly argue that this pattern proves Kashmir is more useful to the establishment as a domestic instrument than as a genuine foreign policy objective. The military’s budget, its political clout, and its control over national narrative all benefit from keeping Kashmir unresolved and perpetually inflamed. Actually forcing a diplomatic confrontation with Saudi Arabia that might materially shift the global balance on Kashmir would require economic and strategic sacrifices the establishment appears unwilling to make, regardless of who sits in the prime minister’s chair.
The Double Standard Of Muslim Solidarity
Saudi Arabia’s stance on Kashmir also exposes the selective nature of Muslim solidarity. On Palestine, Riyadh has historically taken strong rhetorical positions, condemning Israeli actions and supporting Palestinian statehood, even as it moves cautiously toward normalization under a broader United States brokered framework. On Kashmir, by contrast, the Kingdom has restricted itself to platitudes about dialogue and stability, studiously avoiding any language that might be read in New Delhi as endorsing self determination or international intervention.
This discrepancy has not gone unnoticed in Pakistan. Commentators ask why the Saudi leadership can take explicit positions on Jerusalem and Gaza while claiming that Kashmir is a bilateral matter on which it must remain neutral. The uncomfortable answer is that India matters to Vision 2030 in ways that Israel does not. Saudi Arabia can still leverage its control over access to holy sites and its role in energy markets to shape Israeli and Western behavior. It has few equivalent levers over India, and India has many over it, from markets and manpower to strategic corridors.
For Pakistanis who grew up believing in a unified Muslim ummah, this is a bitter pill. But it is also an opportunity to reassess whether rhetorical solidarity without material support is worth the cost of alignment. If Saudi Arabia cannot even muster a clear condemnation of the abrogation of Article 370, then perhaps the premise that the road to global Muslim support for Kashmir runs through Riyadh needs to be abandoned. In that debate, Imran Khan’s brief, frustrated attempt to call out the gap between rhetoric and reality will likely be remembered more sympathetically than the compliant silence of other eras.
The Unasked Question In Islamabad
The core question Pakistan’s political and military elites have avoided asking is this. What if Saudi Arabia is not a natural ally on Kashmir at all, but a structural constraint. The 2018 6 billion dollar package, the 2020 loan recall, the aborted Kuala Lumpur Summit, the carefully hedged OIC statements, and the growing Indo Saudi strategic partnership all point in one direction.
From Riyadh’s perspective, Pakistan is useful as a source of trained military manpower, a potential nuclear backstop in an extreme regional crisis, and an occasional buffer or mediator in its dealings with Iran. It is not a partner whose grievances over Kashmir can be allowed to jeopardize larger economic and geopolitical designs centered on India, the United States, China, and Europe.
From Islamabad’s perspective, however, this reality risks exposing decades of myth making. It reveals that the self proclaimed guardians of the national interest have allowed Pakistan to become so dependent on external bailouts that it cannot meaningfully leverage its Islamic card on the one issue it claims to hold most dear. It shows that the establishment’s loudest slogans on Kashmir fall silent when confronted with the hard arithmetic of oil credit lines and expatriate jobs, and that when a popular leader tried to push that contradiction into the open, he was quickly cut back down to size.
In that sense, Saudi Arabia’s calculated silence on Kashmir is not just an indictment of Riyadh’s pragmatism. It is a mirror held up to Pakistan’s ruling class. The reflection is not flattering, though it does contain one brief moment when someone in Islamabad tried to tilt the mirror in a different direction.