Pakistan Wants to Turn the Mecca Pact Into an Islamic anti-Israel NATO
Barely hours after Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Türkiye signed their new mutual defence agreement in Mecca, Pakistan’s Defence Minister Khawaja Asif gave the emerging alliance something its official text had carefully avoided: an enemy.
Israel (and India).
Asif called for Muslim countries to unite against Israel and advocated a united military front, arguing that the threat posed by the Jewish state extended beyond Palestine to the Muslim world as a whole.
Pakistan has never recognised Israel and Pakistani politicians have frequently adopted strongly anti-Israel and strongly anti-semitic positions. What makes Asif’s latest intervention different is that it comes immediately after Islamabad entered a potentially historic collective defence arrangement with Saudi Arabia and Türkiye.
The Mecca Joint Defence Agreement brings together three of the most important Sunni-majority states in the world, with a combined population of around 380 million. Its central provision states that an armed attack against one member will be treated as an attack against all three.
On paper, it remains a defensive pact directed against nobody in particular. Pakistan already appears interested in giving it a much larger purpose. Islamabad has repeatedly advocated stronger military coordination between Muslim countries, and Asif himself has spoken about the need for Muslim states to develop collective security arrangements.
The Mecca pact gives this ambition a convincing institutional foundation. Pakistan whose has only its army, chinese weaponry and its nuclear weaponry to offer, turns what should have been a defensive pact against Iran attacking Saudi Arabia into a united muslim enterprise against Israel and India.
Türkiye contributes NATO’s second-largest military, extensive combat experience and an increasingly sophisticated domestic defence industry. Saudi Arabia brings financial power, enormous defence expenditure and unparalleled political weight in the Arab and Islamic worlds.
Pakistan brings something neither possesses: nuclear weapons. It also possesses one of the Muslim world’s largest professional militaries and decades of defence cooperation with Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states. Its also under attack from its own creation, the Taliban-an extremist Islamic terrorist network formed from the Mujahideen trained under a joint project by the US, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan as well as strong militancy from Balochistan which seeks independance. At the moment there is also protests in Pakistan occupied Kashmir against Pakistani army’s abuses and election fraud.
Asif’s intervention suggests that at least part of Pakistan’s political establishment already sees the agreement as potentially much more than a trilateral insurance policy. The ambition appears to be the creation of something approaching an Islamic NATO.
Every collective security organisation eventually confronts the same question: collective defence against whom? Pakistan has already answered the question which the Mecca agreement has ignored.
His identification of Israel as a common threat is particularly consequential because the three members have fundamentally different relationships with the Jewish state.
Pakistan does not recognise Israel and any attempt at recognition would be politically explosive. Islamabad can consequently adopt an explicitly anti-Israel position with relatively limited diplomatic cost.
Türkiye is different. Ankara recognises Israel and has maintained diplomatic relations with it for decades, even though relations under President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan have deteriorated dramatically.
Saudi Arabia occupies the most delicate position of all. Riyadh does not recognise Israel, but Saudi-Israeli normalisation remains the logical next stage of the Abraham Accords and an important component of the emerging economic architecture connecting India, the Gulf and Europe.
Projects such as the India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor ultimately become far more viable in a region where Saudi Arabia and Israel can cooperate and Saudi Arabia has often considered potential joining the Abraham accords, before the Hamas terrorist attack in October 2023.
An explicitly anti-Israel interpretation of the Mecca pact would make that considerably more difficult. This creates the first significant test for the new alliance almost immediately after its creation.
Saudi Arabia can comfortably participate in a mutual defence arrangement with Pakistan and Türkiye, especially against Iran and the Houthis. It is considerably harder for Riyadh to participate in a military bloc whose purpose is defined by Islamabad as confronting Israel or even worse, a strong ally like India.
The kingdom must simultaneously manage its position as a leader of the Islamic world, its support for Palestinian statehood, its strategic relationship with Washington and the possibility of eventually normalising relations with Israel.
Pakistan has little to lose. Indeed, Islamabad has powerful reasons to promote a broader Islamic security architecture. Such an arrangement would elevate Pakistan from a major South Asian military power into one of the principal guarantors of security across the Muslim world and wrest the leadership from the other two countries which have been the first and last caliphates of Islam and have some claim.
Its nuclear arsenal gives Field Marshall Asim Munir’s ambition particular significance.The question of nuclear deterrence will inevitably hang over the Mecca pact even if nuclear weapons are never mentioned in its public provisions. Any military adversary calculating the consequences of confrontation with a Pakistan-linked collective defence structure cannot simply ignore Pakistan’s nuclear capability.
This makes Asif’s rhetoric considerably more consequential than another denunciation of Israel. There is another contradiction that Pakistan’s preferred interpretation cannot easily resolve.
If the principle underlying an Islamic collective defence organisation is that Muslim countries should unite against threats to fellow Muslim states, Islamabad has already placed India within the same framework.
Pakistan has historically internationalised its disputes with India by presenting Kashmir as a wider Islamic issue.Saudi Arabia and Türkiye, however, have very different relationships with New Delhi.
Saudi Arabia has developed an increasingly important strategic and economic partnership with India. India is central to IMEC and to Riyadh’s broader ambitions to transform itself into a commercial bridge connecting Asia, the Middle East and Europe.
Türkiye has its own disagreements with India, particularly over Kashmir and Ankara’s close relationship with Pakistan, but it too has substantial economic interests in maintaining relations with New Delhi. An ideological alliance built around Pakistan’s definition of the enemies of the Muslim world does not make sense to the Saudi’s or the Turks.
Saudi Arabia and Türkiye agreed to a collective defence mechanism. Pakistan immediately began placing that mechanism within a much broader political narrative. Islamabad appears to envisage a Muslim security bloc capable not merely of defending its three members but eventually of coordinating military power across the Islamic world.
Israel provides the most obvious unifying cause. Yet what looks unifying from Islamabad looks considerably more complicated from Riyadh and Ankara.
The Muslim world is divided over Iran, Israel, India, the United States and even over relations among its own major powers. Türkiye and Saudi Arabia have spent much of the past decade competing for regional influence. Gulf states themselves have only recently emerged from profound internal divisions.
An Islamic NATO therefore faces a fundamental problem before it even exists: NATO was created by countries that broadly agreed on the threat they faced. The Muslim world does not.
For years, the idea of a unified Muslim military front belonged largely to speeches, summit declarations and political rhetoric. The Mecca pact has created an actual collective defence structure linking three militarily significant Sunni Muslim states.
Khawaja Asif has now supplied the ideological ambition. Pakistan evidently wants that structure to become the nucleus of something larger.
Whether Saudi Arabia and Türkiye want the same thing is the question that will determine whether the Mecca pact remains a pragmatic three-country defence agreement or becomes the first building block of an entirely new security architecture stretching from the Mediterranean to South Asia.
