Islamabad, March 5 (IANS) The reverberations of the US-Israeli strikes on Iran and Tehran’s subsequent response has also exposed fissures within Pakistan’s own society, experts reckon. Shia communities, in particular, took to the streets in protest after the killing of Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei, demanding solidarity and also questioning Islamabad’s posture. These demonstrations were not just about Pakistan’s foreign policy; they were about identity, belonging, and whether the State’s priorities align with the realities facing its citizens.
The Pakistani government’s response has been a tightrope walk. It condemned the strikes, affirmed Islamabad’s support for Iran as a neighbouring Muslim state, and deployed security forces to quell unrest. But it also moved quickly to distance itself from any notion that Pakistan would enter into direct confrontation with Israel or become a proxy in a larger regional war. That narrative, officials insist, does not reflect Islamabad’s position.
A nation’s power is measured in the moment of crisis and Pakistan is facing many. Domestically, it is fighting with rebels at home, like the Balochistan Liberation Army and Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan. Its economic situation is in doldrums. The country’s most popular leader has been jailed for many years, with his fundamental human rights as a jail inmate also having been compromised. Pakistan is also fighting a war with Afghanistan on its western frontier. Its borders with India remain tense after Operation Sindoor, which New Delhi insists it has only paused for now.
Now, Pakistan finds itself increasingly embroiled in the Middle East conflict with the country’s around 15 per cent Shia population boiling over the killing of its topmost religious cleric. Only a few days ago, a violent mob stormed the US Consulate in Karachi, resulting in the massacre of at least 22 Pakistanis.
In this situation, Pakistan lives in contradiction between being a guardian of the so-called ‘Islamic bomb’ and claiming rhetorical Muslim unity in the broader Middle East. In reality though, the country is always driven by one great power or another. To put things into perspective, we need to go back to history, where, after India had developed its indigenous nuclear capabilities in the 1970s and Pakistan was partitioned, the political elites in Pakistan, especially Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, thought that having a nuclear weapon as a deterrence would help in keeping the State intact.
Obviously, Pakistan’s nuclear ambitions were guided solely against India, but the country had no money to fund such a programme. The Middle Eastern countries came in handy here. In February 1974, shortly after the Arab-Israeli War of 1973, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto organised the second Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) Summit. Bhutto knew that the Middle Eastern countries had received substantial funds due to the 1973 oil embargo and the subsequent increase in oil prices. With this money, he wanted to fund his nuclear weapons programme. The rhetoric of ‘Islamic Bomb’ came in handy. He said that all civilisations in the world have nuclear capabilities except the Islamic world. Bhutto claimed that if Pakistan is able to develop nuclear capabilities, it will be able to help the Islamic world in times of need. He also got good funding, especially from Libya and Saudi Arabia.
Last year, Iranian Commander Mohsen Rezaei claimed that, “Pakistan has assured us that if Israel uses a nuclear bomb on Iran they will attack Israel with a nuclear bomb”.
However, Pakistan was quick to refute this claim with Defence Minister Khawaja Muhammad Asif writing on X, “Our nuclear capability is for the benefit of our people and defence of our country against the hostile designs of our enemies”.
There are moments when the rhetoric of deterrence veers uncomfortably close to bravado. Six months before the Iran escalation, Asif stoked speculation by hinting that Saudi Arabia might enjoy nuclear “coverage” under a defence pact with Islamabad, only to later clarify that nuclear arms were “not on the radar”. Such ambiguity does little to reassure a population seeking clarity.
This is why the notion of Pakistan as a security guarantor in the Middle East — an “Islamic nuclear State” ready to police regional order — falls apart. Nuclear weapons, for all their destructive potential, are not a passport to regional leadership. They are a blunt instrument of last resort, meant to prevent invasion, not to shape the destinies of far-flung theatres of conflict. If Islamabad now feels exposed, it is not because its arsenal has failed; it is because the very foundations of strategic deterrence have been shaken. When a country’s neighbours can be struck and their leaders killed by foreign powers without immediate global backlash, it forces a revaluation of where true security lies.
The question Pakistan now faces is if it can redefine what security means in an era where conventional and nuclear weapons are no longer inviolable shields, and where the threats are as much political and economic as they are military. In the end, the fear on Pakistan’s streets is that of isolation and entanglement. That fear, as much as any missile or doctrine, will shape Pakistan’s choices in the near future.
–IANS
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