Pakistan and Qatar: Constraints and Dilemmas

Abstract

Since June 5, 2017, Pakistan has faced what amounts to a Hobson’s choice. Saudi Arabia has been asking its fellow Sunni Muslim ally: “Are you with Qatar or with us?” While Islamabad has expressed solidarity with Saudi Arabia and its people, and has always upheld the Saudi monarch’s guardianship and jurisdiction over Islam’s two most holy sites (Mecca and Medina), it has also reiterated that Pakistan has no plans to join the quartet (Bahrain, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE) in severing ties with Doha. On the day the Qatar crisis erupted, Nafees Zakaria, a spokesperson for Pakistan’s foreign ministry, declared: “At the moment there is nothing on [the] Qatar issue, [we] will issue a statement if some development takes place.”

Nonetheless, to placate Saudi Arabia, Pakistan has offered to leverage its influence over Qatar to defuse the situation. For this purpose, then-Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif promised to visit Kuwait, Qatar, and Turkey. An official familiar with the development explained that Pakistan would merely complement Kuwait’s efforts to deflate the crisis, rather than playing the role of a direct mediator between Qatar and its fellow Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) members and Egypt.