TURKEY-PAKISTAN Ankara helps Islamabad in floods (but with complementary weapons)

The humanitarian emergency has become an opportunity to reactivate the alliance. Ankara is ready to build thousands of houses for the affected Pakistani families. Weapons, construction and agriculture are the sectors that arouse the greatest interest. As a background, the common ideology, characterized by nationalism, the vision of Islam and the (possible) tensions with Iran and Saudi Arabia

Milan () – Turkey is once again using solidarity as a weapon of geopolitical influence. This time the recipient country of his attentions is Pakistan. The intense rains of recent days have caused more than 1,200 deaths and left a third of its territory under water.

In addition to the mourning, there are billions of dollars in damage and a country to rebuild. The Turkish president has not let the opportunity pass and last week, in the midst of an emergency, he sent a large delegation to Islamabad led by the Minister of the Interior, Suleyman Soylu, and the Minister of the Environment and Climate Change, Murat Kurum. They were accompanied on the plane by a working group from Afad, the Turkish civil protection, but above all from Toki, the powerful urban planning and construction authority. The latter will build 4,620 emergency homes for families affected by the catastrophe.

The humanitarian effort is certainly not accidental. Relations between Turkey and Pakistan have grown increasingly close in recent years, encouraged by Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s continued emphasis on common Muslim roots. A synergy highly valued by Ankara, which considers Pakistan a valuable resource to enter a complex and strategic region, but also by Islamabad, for which Turkey represents an important means that would allow it to open up to new markets and acquire valuable technical knowledge in sectors such as agriculture and construction to boost internal development. And, above all, weapons. According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), between 2016 and 2019 Turkey supplied Pakistan with 112 million dollars in weapons, to which must be added the 3 billion dollars for the purchase of 4 corvettes and 30 129 Atak helicopters.

A “mutual strategic understanding”, as Pakistani President Arif Alvi called it, who in 2020 alone signed 13 strategic agreements and will very soon receive Erdogan on an official visit. These two countries have common characteristics that also arouse the attention, and in some cases the concern, of the international community. Indeed, they are two medium-sized powers but they aspire to autonomy in the defense industry and to influence macro-regional balances. Turkey’s ambitions are higher and more motivated than Pakistan’s, but the fact is that this alliance can be particularly useful in influencing particularly complex situations. The great test for this synergy is Afghanistan.

But there are also other open fronts that must be taken into account, in relation to “neighbors” that could help reinforce this understanding. That is why in January, shortly before the war in Ukraine began, Ankara and Islamabad signed a joint declaration in which, fundamentally, they said they had found a common platform on some international issues that, in different forms and measures, are of interest to both countries. Specifically, the island of Cyprus, Kashmir and Nagorno-Karabakh.

This “mutual strategic understanding” also has very specific ideological and cultural contours. Turkey and Pakistan are an expression of the attempt to give life to an Islamic nationalism using all the means at their disposal, including television. In a world where consciences are forged by fiction, Ankara has dubbed the television series Dirilis Ertugul, about the father of one of the founders of the Ottoman Empire, which was followed by millions of viewers in Pakistan. The success was so great that the two countries decided to produce a second series, entitled Turk Lala, whose protagonist, a Pakistani, is catapulted into the past, specifically to the Turkey of 1920, and joins the ranks of the Ottoman empire, which coincidentally fights against the West. Islamic nationalism, but extremely pragmatic and oriented towards building a common and shared vision. In this process, however, Ankara must be careful not to embarrass other major powers in the Islamic world, notably Iran and Saudi Arabia, which for different reasons pay as much attention to Islamabad as Turkey.