Director General ISPR Lt Gen Ahmed Sharif Chaudhry has described the Makkah defence agreement as purely defensive (Express Tribune).
What he said
The pact has “no offensive, no interference, no aggressive element” and represents “collective deterrence” among Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Türkiye.
“There is nothing aggressive. There are no regional aspirations.”
He rejected the description “Muslim alliance”, calling it a “regional stability alliance” open to partners sharing values of “non-aggression, non-interference and collective deterrence”.
The answer on military obligations
Asked how the three would respond to an attack on a partner, he said “the operationalisation of the defensive commitments had never been made public in any discourse”, and that the three countries would decide their response among themselves.
That is the whole question, and it remains unanswered by design
A mutual defence pact whose triggering mechanism is deliberately unpublished is not a drafting failure. Ambiguity is the standard architecture of deterrence — an adversary that cannot calculate the response has to assume the worst.
But the ambiguity is being maintained on the day a drone was destroyed near the city the agreement is named after, and five weeks after signature. This newspaper noted on 10 September that an alliance producing “premature to discuss specific military protocols” one month in had disclosed something about its readiness. Six days later the formulation has changed but the content has not.
On China
Chaudhry called the pact complementary to Pakistan’s “iron-clad” relationship with Beijing: “Nobody has any problem with that, everyone understands that this is defensive.”
That reassurance was worth giving. China’s foreign minister Wang Yi met his Iranian counterpart in Beijing this week and urged that the Strait of Hormuz be reopened — Beijing is managing its own interests in the same crisis, and is Iran’s largest oil customer.
What is not established
No threshold, consultation procedure, command arrangement or timeline under the pact has been made public. India and Afghanistan were not addressed in the briefing as reported, and no Pakistani deployment change has been announced.
[Image: Screengrab via The Express Tribune]
