The ink was still wet on the page, a formal declaration of intent sealed with a firm handshake. Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif of Pakistan and Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia embraced for the cameras, a display of solidarity that would be broadcast around the globe. Yet, in the quiet halls behind the public spectacle, the celebrations were muted, the mood heavy with the gravity of what the pact truly signified.
A senior Saudi official, the one who had spoken to Reuters, watched the scene unfold on a monitor, a sense of grim finality settling over him. He knew the official line—that this was a culmination of longstanding cooperation—but the timing was no coincidence. The air still hung heavy with the dust and acrid smoke from what the world was calling “last week’s incident”: Israel’s attack on Qatar. It was an event that had shattered the illusion of stability and, more profoundly, the long-held trust in external guarantors.
Military action, the official mused, was a different language altogether. It spoke not in the measured tones of diplomacy or the careful phrasing of communiqués, but in the language of irreversible and permanent effects. The images of shattered glass and scorched earth from Doha weren’t just headlines; they were scars on the body of the region itself, physical wounds that had severed diplomatic trust and precluded any real development. Political debate was a game of chess; this was a scorched-earth policy where there were no winners, only survivors.
This new agreement with Pakistan was not a solution. It was a concession. It was an acknowledgment that words had failed, that dialogue had become an obsolete tool. The official recalled the conversations, the fruitless efforts to de-escalate, and the chilling realization that had descended upon them all: once the first missile was launched, the path of words was closed forever. War, the ultimate accumulation of military action, was a state of being that precluded solutions. The only way to end it was not through negotiation, but through exhaustion, through a mutual and irredeemable destruction that left nothing left to fight for. The mutual defense pact was, in its essence, a preparation for that very end.
He thought of India, Pakistan’s rival and a nuclear power, and the delicate dance of their own growing relationship. The official’s words to the press about their robust ties felt hollow now, a desperate clinging to a time when peace seemed plausible. As the images of the leaders embracing faded from the screen, he was left with the chilling truth: the pact was not a promise of peace, but a reluctant acceptance of the inevitability of war.
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