The Makkah Pact’s first test: Can Pakistan defend Saudi Arabia without entering Yemen’s war?

The Middle East is entering another dangerous phase, and this time the test isn’t hypothetical anymore. Yemen’s Houthis have just made their biggest advance in years down the Red Sea coast, seizing the Greater and Lesser Hanish islands near Bab el-Mandeb and pushing toward Mokha — reigniting a civil war that’s now well into its second decade. In the process, they’ve handed the newly signed Makkah Joint Defence Agreement between Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Turkiye its first real test, barely a month after the ink dried.

The pact was signed at Al-Safa Palace on August 7, 2026, by Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. Its central clause is blunt: an armed attack against one member is to be treated as an attack against all.

Pakistan, for its part, has always insisted the arrangement is defensive rather than an invitation to war. That distinction used to be a matter of language. It isn’t anymore — Islamabad is now being asked, in effect, to show what those words actually mean.

A crisis that has outgrown Yemen’s borders

What started as a Yemen story has stopped being one. Over the past two weeks, Saudi Arabia has hit back at the Houthi advance with roughly 300 air raids in five days and has promised a “firm” response to any continued attacks on its territory. The human toll keeps climbing on both sides of the border: the UN says 125,000 Yemenis have fled their homes and around 150 civilians have been killed since September 3 alone, while the disruption has rattled Saudi oil markets more broadly.

Then, on September 16, things got even sharper. A Saudi-led coalition intercepted and shot down a Houthi drone that had been heading toward Mecca — the kind of target Riyadh treats as an absolute red line, given what the city represents. Pakistan’s response came quickly. Defence Minister Khawaja Asif said Islamabad was “ready to fulfil its obligations” under the pact, adding plainly: “The Makkah Agreement applies to us, and we will fulfil our duty.”

What Pakistan has actually done — and what still hasn’t happened

Here’s where the gap between what’s said and what’s done becomes the real story, and it cuts right to the question this piece is trying to answer.

For all of Asif’s language, Pakistan hasn’t moved to activate the pact militarily. Back on September 10, Islamabad made clear it wasn’t considering an immediate military response, and that its approach for now would stay mostly diplomatic.

As of September 17–18, Turkish and Pakistani officials were telling the Associated Press that Riyadh hadn’t even formally asked for help under the pact — this despite Saudi Arabia quietly looking elsewhere. Oman and Egypt seem to be doing most of the diplomatic heavy lifting at the moment, with officials framing Riyadh’s posture as giving “diplomacy a chance” before reaching for anything more direct.

Türkiye has its own excuse for moving slowly: its parliament may not ratify the pact until October, which keeps the agreement in limbo regardless of what Ankara actually wants to do.

None of this is cost-free. Saudi Arabia appears to be hedging by turning to other partners: MBS reportedly called President Trump twice to ask for US strikes on the Houthis; Trump said no but offered intelligence support instead, and Riyadh is said to be sounding out Israel and Britain too — largely because its Makkah partners haven’t stepped up. Analysts including Steven A. Cook have started asking, openly, whether the pact’s credibility has already taken a hit simply because nothing military has followed the signing ceremony.

Which is really the crux of the problem: what looks like sensible restraint from Islamabad can look, from Riyadh, uncomfortably close to being left alone.

What defensive support already looks like

It would be wrong to say Pakistan has done nothing. Al Jazeera’s reporting notes that Pakistan already has about 16 JF-17 Thunder aircraft, along with air-defence systems and troops, stationed in Saudi Arabia under existing arrangements that predate the current crisis. Field Marshal Asim Munir has also been in direct contact with Iran’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi, alongside Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Faisal bin Farhan. Islamabad has been using that channel to press Tehran to rein in the Houthis, all while reminding Iran of Pakistan’s defence commitments to Riyadh. Quietly, that diplomatic line may be doing more useful work right now than any troop deployment could.

This is really the distinction Pakistan seems to be drawing in practice, whether or not it’s said out loud: air-defence cooperation, intelligence-sharing, and a standing military presence on Saudi soil belong to a different category than joining offensive strikes inside Yemen. The Makkah Accord’s own stated goals — collective deterrence, training, capacity-building, cooperation on defence technology — support the former without demanding the latter.

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Pakistan’s most difficult balancing act

None of this is a problem military planning alone can solve. Pakistan has a genuinely deep defence relationship with Saudi Arabia. It also sits right next to Iran and has spent years trying to keep that relationship workable. And it has no interest whatsoever in watching Yemen become the spark for a full-blown Saudi-Iran confrontation — which is exactly why the Munir-Araghchi backchannel matters as much as anything happening on the ground.

China’s posture is also worth keeping an eye on. Back in January 2024, Chinese officials leaned on Iran to rein in Houthi attacks on Red Sea shipping, warning it could cost Iran on the trade front. Given how much Chinese commerce runs through both chokepoints, that’s a precedent Beijing could easily revisit. The Chinese-brokered Saudi-Iran rapprochement of 2023 already proved Beijing is comfortable playing that kind of intermediary role.

Put the incentives side by side and they don’t line up neatly, but they don’t point toward war either. Saudi Arabia wants its security guaranteed. Iran wants to hang on to its regional leverage. China wants trade routes to keep functioning. Pakistan wants to honour its Saudi partnership without opening a new front with Iran. Türkiye wants more regional weight, though its own parliament is holding that back for now. Different goals, sure — but the diplomacy already underway, from Oman and Egypt’s mediation to the Munir-Araghchi contacts, suggests everyone currently prefers to keep it that way.

The Arabian Sea connection

There’s a Pakistani angle to all this that rarely gets mentioned. Bab el-Mandeb eventually opens into the Arabian Sea, which means Karachi, Gwadar and Pakistan’s own maritime backyard aren’t as far removed from Yemen’s crisis as they might seem. A prolonged shutdown of Red Sea shipping tends to push up freight costs and insurance premiums and can shift trade toward alternative routes — a dynamic that cuts both ways for CPEC, raising the strategic appeal of Gwadar even as it raises the risk premiums investors attach to it.

The danger of entering Yemen

The genuinely hard decision for Islamabad would only arrive if Riyadh formally asked Pakistan to join direct military action against the Houthis on Yemeni soil — and as of this writing, that request hasn’t come. That would be an entirely different order of commitment from the defensive cooperation already in place. A Pakistani combat role inside Yemen would risk retaliation, complicate the relationship with Iran, stir up sectarian tensions, and turn what is currently a defensive alliance into a party to an open-ended war — undoing exactly the diplomatic-bridge role Pakistan is playing rather well at the moment.

Three things remain distinct, and worth saying plainly: defending Saudi territory, deterring attacks on the pact’s members, and fighting offensively inside Yemen. Pakistan is doing the first two right now. The third is a far bigger and costlier decision — and one Riyadh hasn’t yet asked Islamabad to make.

The real test, still unfolding

The Makkah Accord’s real test was never going to be whether Pakistani boots end up on Yemeni ground. It’s being decided right now, in real time, by whether the pact can produce credible deterrence — through the squadrons already there, the air-defence cooperation, and the diplomatic pressure being applied on Iran — without pulling Pakistan into a war it has no appetite for fighting directly.

So far, Islamabad has chosen restraint over intervention. Seen from Rawalpindi, that looks like discipline: keeping the line clear between defending Saudi territory, deterring attacks on pact members, and fighting inside Yemen, and refusing to blur the three together. Seen from Riyadh, in the middle of its worst security crisis in years, and reportedly working the phones to Washington, Tel Aviv and London while its own treaty partners stay quiet, that same restraint can read very differently — closer to absence than discipline. It’s telling that Steven A. Cook and others are already asking the question out loud.

That gap in how the same restraint gets read — more than anything happening on a Yemeni battlefield — may end up deciding how the Makkah Accord is remembered: as the moment Pakistan grew into a serious regional security guarantor, or as a pact that looked solid on paper and thin the first time it was tested. Pakistan still has room to close that gap — through the diplomatic channels already open with Tehran, through visible coordination with Riyadh that stops short of combat, and through being clearer about what “ready to fulfil obligations” actually means when it counts. What it can’t afford is letting silence stand in for an answer it never meant to give.

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