ISLAMABAD: Pakistan’s newly signed security pact with Saudi Arabia is a NATO-style agreement covering a “comprehensive spectrum” of defense cooperation, Musadiq Malik, a federal minister and Islamabad’s focal person for relations with the Kingdom, said this week, stressing the arrangement was purely defensive in nature.
The two countries signed the Strategic Mutual Defense Agreement (SMDA) in Riyadh on Sept. 18, cementing decades-old defense ties into a formal pact. The deal, signed during Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif’s visit to Saudi Arabia, stipulated that aggression against one country would be treated as an attack on both.
The joint statement issued after the signing of the pact stressed that the accord was aimed at developing aspects of defense cooperation between the two countries and strengthening joint deterrence against any aggression.
“I think it’s a very comprehensive agreement, and in that we have diffusion of technology, we have training of the forces, we have intelligence sharing, we have preparatory work in terms of joint exercises and a commitment that an attack on one country would be deemed as an attack on both the countries,” Malik told Arab News in an exclusive interview on Monday.
