by TARIQUE NIAZI
The two countries are building trade and energy links before the next big climate confab in Baku.
It is very rare that a leader from the southern Caucasus treks to a south Asian nation on business. But a blooming bromance between Azerbaijan and Pakistan has made this rarity routine. On July 11-12, President Ilham Aliyev of Azerbaijan landed in Islamabad on what Pakistan described a “state visit.” He received the protocol that Islamabad reserves for dignitaries from the United States and the People’s Republic of China. A pair of Pakistan’s sleek fighter jets escorted the presidential plane as soon as it entered the country’s airspace. While flanking him, the pilot of a Pakistani jet dived close to the president’s aircraft to greet him with a military salute.
As if this were not enough, Pakistan’s Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif was waiting “in person” to receive Aliyev at a Pakistan Airforce Base in Islamabad. As the Pakistani president emerged from the plane, Sharif stretched his arms wide to embrace him. They had three customary bear hugs, before they walked to the VVIP (Very, Very Important Person) lounge. The prime minister Sharif held a big umbrella that shaded them both against the blistering sun and the temperature over 10o degrees. Summers in Islamabad are unusually cooler and winters milder. But climate change has turned the natural order of things upside down.
President Aliyev has been to Pakistan before, but not on a state visit. He was in Islamabad in 2017 to attend the annual summit of the Economic Cooperation Organization (ECO), a 10-member regional alliance with its headquarters in Tehran, Iran. Only a week ago, he met with Prime Minister Sharif at the Shanghai Cooperation Organization’s (SCO) summit that was held in Astana, Kazakhstan. Azerbaijan is a dialogue partner of the SCO.
In 2017, Azerbaijan, Pakistan, and Turkey formed a Trilateral Summit Forum that meets yearly, most recently this month in Astana. One of the major features of this forum is defense and security cooperation. The three nations hold joint military exercises, like the one held in 2021 affectionately dubbed “Three Brothers.” Pakistan offered “political support” to Azerbaijan to help resolve its 30-year old conflict with Armenia over the Nagorno-Karabakh region.
How effective is this alphabet soup of regional organizations? If you are Armenian, none at all. Armenia is a member of the Russia-led Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) comprising six post-Soviet states. The treaty’s Article 4 echoes NATO in proclaiming “aggression against one is aggression against all.” When Azerbaijan and Armenia fought over the disputed territory of Nagorno-Karabakh, neither Russia nor the CSTO lifted a finger to help disengage the parties, save tens of thousands of lives, or spare the dislocation of hundreds of thousands of Azeris and Armenian-Azeris.
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