On Qatar, Pakistan walks a diplomatic tightrope

Asad Hashim, aljazeera.com

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Parliament expresses 'deep concern' over Gulf diplomatic rift, but government stops short of taking a side.

Excerpt:

Pakistan's relationship with Saudi Arabia and the UAE is based on close diplomatic ties, but also deep economic relations.

Saudi Arabia is home to more than 1.9 million Pakistanis, mostly unskilled workers, while the UAE hosts a further 1.2 million, according to government data.

Qatar, a much smaller country by comparison, hosts only 115,000 Pakistani citizens.

Those expatriate Pakistanis have a significant impact on their country's economy, with foreign remittances playing an important role in bolstering Pakistan's foreign exchange reserves. ...

Saudi Arabia and the UAE are also two of Pakistan's major trading partners. The South Asian country has imported goods and services worth $5.84bn from the UAE in the current fiscal year, and a further $1.95bn from Saudi Arabia, according to the central bank. ...

In addition, Pakistan's Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif holds close ties with the ruling families in both Saudi Arabia and Qatar. In 2000, when he fled a military coup, Sharif resided in Jeddah, a Saudi Arabian port city on the Red Sea, for eight years while in exile. ...

"Of all Muslim nations, Pakistan is probably in the most difficult position," James Dorsey, a senior fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies in Singapore and specialist on Pakistan's relations with Gulf countries, told Al Jazeera. ...

Dorsey argued that while the relationship with Qatar is strong, Saudi Arabia has more leverage to exert on Pakistan, if push comes to shove.

"There is a lot of Saudi money going into Pakistan. When Pakistan has a financial shortage, there are two places they go: Saudi and China," he said. ...

Moreover, Saudi Arabia has also embarked on a soft power campaign in Pakistan for decades, said Dorsey, whose research has tracked donations and funding trails from the Gulf kingdom to Pakistani religious organisations.

"Saudi Arabia in the last four decades has waged the single largest public diplomacy campaign in history. […] That campaign was designed to further a Sunni Muslim ultraconservatism world view." ...