By BarathVector Editorial — 2026-08-22

The Escape Route

Pakistan's general staff owes Riyadh, Ankara, Beijing, Tehran and its own street. There is one move that pays all five at once.

By BarathVector Editorial

As of 23 August 2026, 03:11 IST.

On 20 August Pakistan's National Assembly and Senate passed two laws in a single day, over an opposition walkout about the hours allowed to read them. The Defence Forces of Pakistan Act makes one officer the commander of the army, navy and air force, with the power to hire, fire and retire across all three services short of the service chiefs themselves. The National Command Authority amendment strikes the Chairman Joint Chiefs from the body that controls nuclear weapons and seats in his place the Chief of the Army Staff, serving concurrently as Chief of the Defence Forces. Both titles belong to Field Marshal Asim Munir.

The next morning the federal government approved three army companies for the streets of Rawalpindi for six months under Article 245, for "sensitive security duties" against an "undesirable situation" and "unforeseen threats." Rawalpindi is the city where the army keeps its headquarters and where it keeps Imran Khan. A state that writes itself new powers on Thursday and posts guards outside its own door on Friday is telling you, in the only language it trusts, what it is afraid of.

It is also telling you what it will do about it. Pakistan's general staff now owes five creditors it cannot pay in the currency each one wants. Riyadh wants action against the Houthis. Ankara wants its invoices settled. Beijing wants a corridor to Tehran kept open and a rival kept busy. Tehran wants Pakistan never to choose a side. The street wants Khan out of Adiala and the lights on. There is one action that satisfies all five at once, and it is the one Rawalpindi has taken before: a fight with India, short, deniable at the start and stopped by foreign hands before the cost comes due.

That is the escape route.

Negotiate first, then sign

The money came before the signature.

In April Riyadh placed an additional three billion dollars with the State Bank of Pakistan, in two tranches, taking its deposits to eight billion. In July it rolled a five-billion-dollar deposit over for three years instead of one, and Islamabad asked for a 6.7-billion-dollar deferred-payment oil facility running fifteen years. Then, on 7 August, Saudi Arabia, Türkiye and Pakistan signed the Makkah Joint Defence Agreement. Thirteen days after that, on 20 August, the cabinet in Islamabad approved the two laws and both houses of parliament passed them before the day was out; the next morning the army was on the streets of Rawalpindi.

Read in that order the pact is not a defence treaty with a financing annex. It is a financing arrangement with a defence clause attached, and the clause was written to be cited, not invoked. This newspaper argued on 7 August that the commitment had already failed its only live test, in March, when Iranian missiles reached Saudi soil and Pakistan chose six weeks of mediation. What the signature bought was a standing claim on the flow that was already running, and a reason for Riyadh to keep it running. The money was lent for the Houthi front. Follow the kit, and the bulk of what it buys is going to the Indian one.

The war Pakistan will not fight

The Houthis did not pause for the signing. On 9 August they struck the Aramco refinery at Jazan; the fire was put out without casualties, while Houthi attacks inside Yemen the same day killed seven. A Houthi attack on a ship in the Red Sea that week killed three Pakistanis, as Foreign Minister Ishaq Dar confirmed. On 20 August the Houthis claimed strikes on Najran airport and an Aramco facility. Yemen's four years of relative calm are breaking: the UN envoy told the Security Council on 13 August that the risk of a return to full war is the highest since 2022.

Reuters reported in May that Pakistan had about eight thousand troops, a squadron of JF-17s and a Chinese HQ-9 air-defence battery in the kingdom, sent from April under the earlier bilateral pact after Iranian missiles reached Saudi soil and mostly in advisory and training roles, on the word of five unnamed officials and with neither capital confirming; its sources called them "not there to attack anyone." That description has not changed, and it will not change for as long as Rawalpindi has a cheaper war to offer instead. Pakistan will not fight the Houthis in earnest, and the reason is older than this war. In April 2015, when Riyadh asked for troops, ships and aircraft for Yemen, Pakistan's parliament refused unanimously; the resolution, read out by Ishaq Dar, allowed Pakistani forces to defend Saudi territory and the holy cities and nothing beyond them, and the refusal was about sectarian balance at home. That balance has not improved. The suicide bombing of a Shia mosque at Tarlai Kalan in February killed thirty-one worshippers and was claimed by Islamic State's Pakistan province. A garrison that sits under Saudi air defence is one thing. Pakistani aircraft over Saada are a sectarian war inside Pakistan.

When Riyadh asks for more than a garrison, and the Najran strikes say it will, Rawalpindi will need to be seen doing something for a pact partner under attack. It cannot do it in Yemen. It will look for somewhere else to be attacked.

Iran in abeyance

The second creditor is the one Pakistan has spent six months not choosing against.

Since March Pakistan has played up Iran without once engaging it: a five-point plan announced jointly with Beijing, a 45-day truce proposal, the Islamabad talks of April, the field marshal's own visit to Tehran in May. Mediation is a posture that promises everything and commits nothing, and it has kept Tehran from treating Pakistan as an enemy while Pakistani jets sat on a Saudi runway.

Underneath the posture runs traffic. Iranian fuel has crossed into Balochistan for years; RFE/RL documented flows of millions of litres a day, by a 2024 Pakistani intelligence estimate around a seventh of national consumption, rising after the war began and falling only when tankers started being hit inside the province. And on 25 April the Commerce Ministry issued a transit order, SRO 691(I)/2026, opening six overland corridors from Karachi, Port Qasim and Gwadar to the Iranian border, framed as humanitarian relief from the Hormuz blockade. In July Reuters reported, via Defense News, that three to four hundred Chinese QW-12 and FN-16 shoulder-fired air-defence missiles, contracted through a Hong Kong intermediary, were being flown from Urumqi into Pakistan and onward to Iran, by air or by road the sources could not say. If by road, the corridors opened in April are the road. Pakistan's military spokesman called the report "absolutely concocted and false," and Beijing denied it too.

What matters is the date now attached to this. On 20 August the US Treasury Secretary, Scott Bessent, told allies they were "either with us or against us" on the economic isolation of Iran, with the detail due on Monday, 24 August. If the sanctions are what they claim to be, Pakistan's corridor is among the first things they hit. Beijing has already refused to join. Pakistan cannot refuse and keep Riyadh, and cannot comply and keep Tehran and Beijing. The one way not to answer a question is to be busy with a bigger one.

One hand on the nuclear chair

Now return to the two laws of 20 August, because they are the instrument that makes the escape route work.

On 9 August 2025, at a black-tie dinner in Tampa from which telephones and recorders were barred, the field marshal was reported by ThePrint, on the recollection of several people present, to have said: "We are a nuclear nation, if we think we are going down, we'll take half the world down with us." India's foreign ministry answered two days later that nuclear sabre-rattling was Pakistan's stock-in-trade, and that the remarks amplified long-standing concerns about the integrity of Pakistan's nuclear command and control, given the army's ties to terrorist groups. A year on, Pakistan has answered that concern in the wrong direction. The officer who made the threat was made Chief of Defence Forces in December and, on 20 August, became the National Command Authority's military seat. The Chairman Joint Chiefs of Staff Committee has been written out of that body and the army chief written in as Chief of Defence Forces. The naval and air chiefs keep their seats and their tenure, but since the 27th Amendment they sit under the Chief of Defence Forces rather than beside him, subordinate by command if not by employment; the prime minister still chairs it on paper. The threat is now real in the precise sense that one man in uniform can make it.

Why does that serve a short war? Because the nuclear bell is what rings the foreign capitals. On 10 May 2025, in the fourth day of the last conflict, Pakistan announced a meeting of the National Command Authority and then denied within hours that one had been called; the telephone calls from Washington and the ceasefire came the same day. The body restructured this week is the body that rang that bell, and the rope is now in one hand.

The timing serves the other creditors too. Riyadh heard in September 2025 from Defence Minister Khawaja Asif, on Geo TV, that "what we have, and the capabilities we possess, will be made available" under the bilateral pact, a line he walked back within hours and Riyadh has not publicly disowned. Riyadh, having heard that sentence, wants one name to call, and now has it. Ankara, which is not in the charity business with inflation at 31.75 per cent in July and the lira near 48 to the dollar, wants one signature on its invoices and its co-production deals, and the Defence Forces Act supplies that. The triangle closes simply: Riyadh pays, Ankara ships, and a share of the kit is shown on the Saudi front, enough to photograph, while the bulk goes where Pakistan's wars are actually fought. A cabinet approval and two parliamentary passages in one working day, thirteen days after Makkah, is a law written with its foreign readers in mind.

The gambler

None of this would matter if the man in the chair were cautious. He is not. He is a gambler whose last two bets paid.

In the week before Pahalgam, in April 2025, Munir told a convention of overseas Pakistanis in Islamabad that their children must be taught "that our forefathers thought we were different from Hindus in every possible aspect of life. Our religion is different, our customs are different, our traditions are different, our thoughts are different, our ambitions are different … We are two nations, we are not one nation." Of Kashmir, in ThePrint's rendering: "Kashmir is our jugular vein; it will be our jugular vein; we will not forget it." Then, on 22 April, twenty-six people were shot dead at Pahalgam, while the American vice-president was in India and the Indian prime minister was in Jeddah as the guest of the kingdom that would later sign in Makkah. India's National Investigation Agency has since chargesheeted Hafiz Saeed and Lashkar-e-Taiba for it; the chargesheets stop at Saeed and the Lashkar chain. He does not say those sentences to a diaspora audience as a performance. He believes them, and the belief is the engine.

The pattern is not Pakistan's alone. October 7 came seventeen days after the Saudi crown prince said on American television that normalisation with Israel drew closer every day, and Hamas political-bureau minutes from five days before the attack, in documents the Israeli military says it recovered in Gaza and the Wall Street Journal reported, name that deal as the thing to stop before the rest of the Arab and Islamic world followed. Pahalgam came with India's prime minister in Jeddah. The hardliners' first need, in Gaza as in Rawalpindi, is that the custodian of the two holy mosques stay inside the tent. Every attack that keeps Riyadh from Jerusalem or from Delhi is, before it is anything else, a message to Riyadh.

The bet he did make, four days of war in May, made him a field marshal. The 27th Amendment in November created the office of Chief of Defence Forces, which he took in December, and wrote lifetime immunity into the five-star rank he already held. The laws of 20 August gave him the nuclear seat. Pakistan has made army chiefs into presidents four times, and there is no reason to think the man who has collected every other title regards that one as beyond reach. Each gamble has raised the stake and each has paid.

He believes, too, that he has bought the house. In June 2025 he lunched with the American president at the White House, the first Pakistani army chief so received who was not also head of state. By Al Jazeera's account his government offered critical minerals, a stablecoin arrangement with the president's family crypto venture that has so far produced no pilot and no transactions, and a Nobel Peace Prize nomination; and from the stage at Sharm el-Sheikh on 13 October 2025 Donald Trump thanked "my favorite field marshal from Pakistan." He takes that for insurance. It is a receipt for past services, and Sergio Gor, Washington's ambassador in Delhi, described Jammu and Kashmir on 19 August as "an important part of India," which is not what insurers say.

The preparation

Indian outlets reported on 20 and 21 August, citing unnamed security sources, that Chinese and Turkish military transports made repeated landings over sixty hours at Nur Khan near Rawalpindi and Masroor near Karachi. No capital has confirmed it and no cargo has been named. What is confirmed, by the Pentagon's count, is that China had delivered twenty of the thirty-six J-10C fighters Pakistan ordered as of May 2025, the Pentagon's reporting cut-off, with the rest then due by early 2026; that Pakistan has said it will acquire up to forty J-35 stealth fighters with the radar aircraft and missile defences to go with them, though no signed contract has been made public; and that no J-35 has arrived, nor, by the soberer reporting, will one before 2027, whatever the videos say. Indian Defence News, without naming a source, reported on 20 August that Turkey has replaced the two mobile mission-control centres for its drones that India destroyed at Nur Khan in May 2025. Whether the sixty hours were resupply to the May 2025 baseline or something beyond it matters less than it seems. The baseline was the India-facing kit that India destroyed; replacing it is preparation against India whichever runway it lands on. Anything beyond the baseline has a simple test: the kit either turns up in Saudi Arabia with Pakistani crews, which is the pact, or at Masroor and Sialkot, which is India. Masroor covers Sir Creek and the sea lane to the Gulf from the same runway.

At Sir Creek the Pakistan Navy released a film on 1 July titled Ababeel, the Divine Strike, and the reporting built on it, by The Week and Defence Security Asia, describes naval commandos at new marine posts between Bandha Dhora and Harami Dhoro with hovercraft, fast boats and Turkish drones of both kinds. India has asked industry for eleven amphibious combat boats for the sector, and Amit Shah said on 29 May that the security grid there is seventy per cent built. Sir Creek is the one sector the last war did not touch and the one with no rules for how the next one starts.

The trigger is already written

The trigger will come, on every precedent this desk can find, from Lashkar-e-Taiba or Jaish-e-Mohammed, and the state has already printed the explanation it will give.

On 14 August, at a Lashkar-linked gathering in Bahawalnagar, the cleric Naseer Madni told the crowd, as Indian outlets reported it, that Hafiz Saeed had "presented 10,000 youths for Kashmir and for the sacrifice of the motherland." A boast is not an order. It is the kind of boast that has preceded orders. Meanwhile every communiqué from the army's spokesman labels the Baloch insurgents "Fitna al-Hindustan" and the Pakistani Taliban "Fitna al-Khwarij," so that the forty-nine men it reported killing this week, with no losses reported, were Indian-sponsored before anyone asked. The vocabulary for blaming India for the next attack inside India does not have to be invented in the hours after it. It is in daily use.

The pressures that make a rally necessary are not easing, and each is a population the state has chosen to treat as an enemy rather than a constituency. In Balochistan, where the movement's political wing asks before anything else for an accounting of the disappeared, the state says a car bomb at Surab on 12 August killed eight militants assembling it, ten more who fled, and three civilians; Mir Yar Baloch, the Baloch Yakjehti Committee and the Baloch National Movement say the air force bombed the Gidar area and killed civilians, twenty by most accounts and more than thirty by some, with the hospitals cordoned. Both counts are claims and neither can be checked, which is itself the point about the province. In Pakistan-occupied Kashmir the Jammu Kashmir Human Rights Observatory has verified eighty-nine civilian deaths since early June, thirty-seven of them linked to the Rawalakot incidents from 27 July, and the government separately acknowledges seven police and paramilitary dead, for a movement whose central demand is that twelve seats in a fifty-three-seat assembly stop being reserved for people who do not live there. Khawaja Asif placed the protesters, in late July, "in the same category as India." Foreign journalists were ordered out.

Then there is the calendar. India hosts the BRICS summit in New Delhi on 12 and 13 September. President Putin has confirmed; President Xi is expected. The operations India has laid at Rawalpindi's door have a habit of arriving when the cameras are already in place. Pathankot came a week after the Indian prime minister stopped in Lahore. Pulwama came three days before the Saudi crown prince landed in Islamabad and five before he reached Delhi. Pahalgam came with the American vice-president in the country and the prime minister in Jeddah. A summit that puts Putin and Xi in Delhi, under India's chairmanship, in the month Pakistan's own streets are under army guard, is the stage this general staff has always preferred. On 13 August this newspaper put a two-month window on the record for a deniable operation inside India. The ten days since have supplied the laws, the garrison, the landings and the boast. The window now has a date in it, and disruption should be expected, and prepared for, on it.

The four-day clock

Everything above rests on one assumption inside Rawalpindi, and it is wrong.

The assumption is that the clock belongs to other people. In May 2025 the Saudi minister of state was in Delhi on 8 May and Islamabad on 9 May; the ceasefire came on the tenth; Washington claimed it; Pakistan's army called the kingdom's role "very positive and wonderful" and the two "brothers forever." Four days of war, one promotion, one victory parade. The general staff has run that tape many times since and has drawn from it the lesson that a short war is a product it knows how to make: a proxy attack, an Indian strike, a Pakistani reply, the nuclear bell, foreign hands on the telephones, a victory song at home. Then, with the ceasefire signed, a sortie or two against the Houthis to show Riyadh the pact was honoured, and Iran still unengaged, still being mediated.

The men who will have to stop it this time have more reasons to try. Riyadh did not lend its money for a Pakistani war of choice against a country that supplies, by Delhi's count, some two and a half million of the kingdom's residents, which is exactly why the money would have to be diverted rather than asked for. Beijing wants India tied down, not a war on its own September calendar, a distinction Rawalpindi has never honoured. The American president will want the credit for a ceasefire again. All of that is true, and all of it is pressure on Delhi.

But the clock is not theirs to set. India's doctrine since May 2025 treats a mass-casualty attack by Pakistani proxies as an act of war, and this newspaper argued on 7 August that both states have removed their own off-ramps. The target set after the next verified attack will not stop at camps. It will reach the machinery that makes the proxy possible and the forces that answer for it, and it will stop when Delhi decides the cost has been imposed, not on the fourth day because a minister has landed. The field marshal's third gamble assumes a croupier who no longer works the table.

What the pact is building

The pact has one effect its authors did not intend. The states it has made targets, or bystanders with something to lose, are finding one another. On 20 August, the day the Chinese and Turkish transports were reported over Nur Khan, Japan's defence minister sat in New Delhi and signed a maritime-security arrangement that commits the two navies to share maritime domain awareness, to build up mine-countermeasure capability together and to explore joint naval shipbuilding and design, with, by Business Standard's account, a meeting of both countries' foreign and defence ministers to be prepared for by the end of the year. India, Israel, the United Arab Emirates and the United States already sit together in I2U2, the grouping the prime minister named alongside the India–Middle East–Europe corridor in February. And on 18 August the Emirates, after two ballistic missiles it attributes to Iran, and Tehran denies firing, one of which came down in its territorial waters, suspended all trade, commercial exchange and financial transactions with Tehran, effective immediately and until further notice.

Put those three dates together and a shape appears that no communiqué has named: India, Japan, Israel and, in all likelihood, the UAE, the four states with the most to lose from a Gulf policed by proxies and a subcontinent policed by deniable attacks. The United States after this presidency should be expected to side with that grouping and not with Makkah, because it is the grouping that keeps sea lanes open and does not fire missiles at its neighbours' ports. Rawalpindi has set out to keep Riyadh inside a tent. What it is building is the coalition outside it.

What India should do now

Deny the trigger its payoff, and say so in advance. The single most useful sentence India can put on the record before 12 September is that an attack on Indian civilians during the summit will not be answered on a timetable set in Riyadh or Washington, and that the answer will not be confined to the launch site. Deterrence that is announced after the event is retaliation; announced before it, it is a price list, and Rawalpindi reads price lists.

Treat the next three weeks as a hardening period rather than a diplomatic one. The approaches that matter are the ones the last war did not test: the creek, the eastern border, the cities that will host delegations, the attribution case that has to be ready within hours, so that the first morning's story is India's.

Say less about Pakistan-occupied Kashmir, not more. The American ambassador said in Srinagar what India usually has to say for itself, and Islamabad's demarche did the rest. Eighty-nine funerals make the argument; Indian television gloating over them unmakes it.

And retire an assumption that has sat inside every Indian crisis plan since 1998: that the other side's nuclear decisions pass through a committee. Since 20 August every uniform on that committee answers to one man.

And read the garrison correctly. Three companies on the streets of Rawalpindi for six months are not a move toward India. They are the admission that the general staff does not trust its own city through the autumn, with a march on Islamabad called for 27 September and a prisoner in Adiala whom the Supreme Court ordered to hospital on 18 August, who was driven to a hospital at midnight on the 20th, Shifa International by most accounts and PIMS by the information minister's, examined, declared fit and driven back by five the next morning, after the court's registrar had returned the government's petition against the order for incomplete paperwork. A man who posts guards at his own door is not confident of the street. He is looking for a bigger door, and there is only one on the map that opens outward.

BarathVector | Geopolitics | 23 August 2026