Opinion The Yemen dilemma

Why”, the White Queen told Alice, “sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast”. For the past three weeks, Pakistan has appeared to be struggling to match her feat of self-delusion, in an effort to legitimise joining the seven despotic monarchies now bombing Yemen in the name of democracy and freedom. The ethical case for intervention, as MPs have been pointing out, isn’t particularly compelling. The Houthi rebels who have overthrown President Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi’s dysfunctional regime pose no credible military threat to Saudi Arabia or to Islam’s holy cities. Hadi’s claims to a democratic mandate were at best tenuous — the only candidate in the elections, standing with the backing of both the opposition and the ruling party in a Saudi-brokered deal, he lost the backing of Yemen’s parliament after Sana’a fell to rebels earlier this year.

Hadi failed, moreover, to win any of the three wars Yemen has been fighting — against al-Qaeda, Somali pirates and tribal insurgents. Iranian support helped the Houthis, a tribal grouping following the Shia sect, to emerge triumphant from this murderous morass. Sunni monarchies, Saudi Arabia and its allies, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Jordan and Morocco, are determined to reverse this historic defeat in what they see as encroachment into their sphere of influence.

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The case for joining in, from Islamabad’s vantage point, is fairly simple: Saudi Arabia has long bankrolled Pakistan’s economy, giving it access to cheap oil, jobs for its workers and generous bailouts. In 2010, when world governments sought guarantees that flood aid would be used responsibly, Saudi Arabia handed out a $300 million blank cheque. Last year, a mysterious $1.5 billion showed up in Pakistan’s foreign currency reserves, deposited by a friend who asked not to be named. Yet, as Pakistan’s politicians understand, doing so could open the road to serious trouble. Iran could retaliate by fuelling Pakistan’s already-volatile sectarian cocktail. China, moreover, has assailed the Saudi campaign. Perhaps most dangerous, the army, already frayed at the edges because of its counter-insurgency commitments at home, could be dragged into an unconventional war overseas. For the moment, Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif is doing his best to drag out a decision for as long as possible. But like Egypt, which just received a $4 billion bailout from Saudi Arabia, Pakistan could determine that it’s just too costly to spurn the demands of a rich friend.