THE prime minister has spoken. His statement should have silenced all those raising questions about why the Saudis are giving us large piles of cash. But the questions continue to be asked. Why?

Isn’t it simple? Mr Nawaz Sharif has issued a denial. But he has denied something that was not being raised as an issue by any informed quarter anyway: that Pakistan had been asked and was getting ready to send its troops to foreign lands.

MQM leader Altaf Hussain was guilty of uninformed politics when he publicly told the army to refuse any government order to send soldiers to Syria. Syria? Yes. Well, Mr Hussain, who hadn’t sourced his earlier statement, expressed ‘relief’ after Mr Sharif’s reassurance.

Altaf Hussain was perhaps the only voice in raising an issue that never was. Possibly, he misunderstood or misinterpreted the anxiety being expressed by informed commentators regarding the likely despatch of anti-aircraft and tank-busting missiles to the Saudi-backed Syrian rebels.

Nobody has denied that the Saudis haven’t expressed a desire to purchase these arms, or already paid for a shopping list. The closest one has come to this was in a Foreign Office briefing where rather than a denial a mention was made of a mandatory ‘end user certificates’ in such deals.

This clearly implied that Pakistan was selling or could sell weapons to possibly Saudi Arabia after receiving the certificate that these would be used by the purchaser itself and not sent on to third parties such as the Syrian rebels, despite media reports suggesting otherwise.

The Syrian rebel group currently being backed by Riyadh is the Southern Front led by the commander of the powerful Yarmouk Brigade which is said to be operating quite effectively in and around Daraa near the Jordanian border.

That’s why suggestions that the lethal Pakistani weapons may make their way to Syria via Jordan raised alarms about our involvement in a brutal conflict where neither side has any regard for civilians or non-combatants, not even for women and children.

Whatever their ideological moorings they are not better than murderous thugs, as rampant execution of unarmed civilians by both sides has demonstrated. Alarm was also raised as the Yarmouk Brigade is said to have worked in tandem with Jabhat al-Nusra, a group of jihadi fighters acknowledged by Ayman al-Zawahiri as an Al Qaeda affiliate in Syria.

Also, given the scale of infighting between for example Jabhat al-Nusra and ISIS (Islamic State of Iraq and Syria), it makes it very dangerous for Pakistan to arm and support one faction of jihadis or the other and/or train their fighters even on third-country soil.

Pan-Islamists as the jihadis are with little regard for any international border makes the fear of a blowback, no matter how distant it seems at this stage, a real possibility. So, let’s hope our leadership considers these factors regardless of ‘end user certificates’.

Another aspect of the prime minister’s denial was meant to cover suggestions that the first visit in several decades of the Bahrain monarch King Hamad was aimed at seeking enhanced security cooperation. But here also rather than be transparent Nawaz Sharif was at best clever.

The Bahrain rulers say Iran is behind the rising tide of demands by the kingdom’s Shia majority for more rights. That’s why in March 2011 when the demonstrations were threatening to get out of control, contingents of the Saudi National Guard arrived in the kingdom and brutally put down the uprising.

Of course, since then more subtle means have been used to beef up the Bahraini security forces with mercenaries recruited from around the Muslim world (Arabs as well as Pakistanis). That the Pakistanis are mostly retired servicemen recruited via ‘welfare’ organisations such as Bahria Foundation allows the government and the military to deny involvement.

If we feel it is in our national interest to continue with these policies and realign ourselves totally with GCC countries (minus Qatar of course which has fallen foul of the rest) and their defence and strategic needs, we should. But shouldn’t a debate happen first to discuss the pros and the cons?

In exchange for all this support, shouldn’t the GCC countries be asked to stop their nationals and organisations from allegedly funding all sorts of jihadi-criminal groups in Pakistan? If this helps restore sanity and bring to an end sectarian murders, it would be a policy worth embracing.

But if all it does is alienate Iran from Pakistan, when our ties are anything but hearty with India and Afghanistan then we’ll have the distinction of having a foreign policy which ensures all our neighbours are angry and hostile towards us. We might have a few more dollars in our account but will live friendless in a volatile, unstable region.

If the government were open about the large cash transfer from the Saudis, why would there be misgivings that we might give away on long leases large tracts of agricultural land to the GCC countries so they can ensure near-fixed price, long-term food security for their people, possibly ignoring the needs of a growing population here?

Nobody is asking for the facsimiles of written agreements. All we need is a reassurance that our legitimate concerns are being addressed. We aren’t an autocratic kingdom, neither are we anyone’s personal empire to be used to pay back old, personal favours. We need transparency in all these areas and we need it now. Is the prime minister listening?

The writer is a former editor of Dawn.

abbas.nasir@hotmail.com