Pakistan Is Selling Billions in Weapons Across Africa. Washington Should Be Paying Attention

Three weeks after Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Turkey stood together at Mecca to sign a NATO-style mutual defense pact, the fine print of that new alliance is starting to show up on runways in Benghazi and battlefields in Darfur.The Mecca Joint Defense Agreement, inked on August 7 by Pakistan’s prime minister, Shehbaz Sharif; Saudi Arabia’s crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman; and Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, declares that an armed attack on any of the three states will be treated as an attack on all of them. Analysts have compared it to NATO’s Article 5.What has drawn far less attention in Washington is the arms pipeline that predates and now runs alongside it: More than $5 billion in Pakistani weapons sales feeding two of the continent’s most combustible conflicts, both of them reportedly bankrolled in part by Riyadh.Pakistan has emerged, almost overnight, as a defense exporter with global reach. It has done so by selling fighter jets, drones, and air-defense systems to a Libyan warlord under a United Nations arms embargo and to a Sudanese military establishment locked in a civil war that has already produced the world’s worst humanitarian crisis.The timing could hardly be more delicate. The United States is now fighting alongside Saudi Arabia against Iran, tightening a security partnership with Riyadh even as Riyadh’s own regional ally is flooding fragile states with weapons.Pakistan’s calculus is less ideological than it looks, according to someone who has closely tracked the Gulf’s shifting alliances.“Like many others in the region, Pakistan sees an opportunity where the U.S. creates a vacuum. It is not so much that Pakistan is looking toward Africa; it’s that Pakistan’s patrons, allies, like Gulf monarchies, are increasingly active across East and Central Africa,” an expert on Islamic affairs and the executive director of The American Center for South Yemen Studies, Fernando Carvajal, tells The New York Sun.The answer starts at Benghazi, where the first of those weapons have already changed hands.The Benghazi HandshakeThe Libya sale drew immediate scrutiny from the United Nations’ arms monitors and human rights groups tracking the conflict, because Libya has been under a UN arms embargo since 2011, intended to keep outside powers from tipping the balance between the internationally recognized government in Tripoli and Khalifa Haftar’s eastern-based forces.A UN panel of experts had already concluded that the embargo wasn’t working, writing in a December 2024 report that outside powers were still slipping military aid to both sides of Libya’s conflict. Pakistani officials have since claimed the deal broke no UN rules.Still, the deal tracks a template Riyadh has followed for years, not a departure from it.“These deals fit with Saudi Arabia’s traditional alignment in Libya, with Haftar, and Sudan, the Sudanese Armed Forces. Of course, in Libya, that conflicts with Turkey, which has traditionally supported the internationally recognized government in Tripoli,” a former British diplomat and senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, Edmund Fitton-Brown, tells the Sun.“That said, Turkey has also been spreading its bets and mending fences with Haftar. In a sense, the Turkish and Saudi positions are converging as neither is as hard over as before in supporting one side over the other.”Riyadh and Ankara have spent years backing opposite sides of Libya’s civil war, yet both are now hedging their bets. Experts stress this overlapping interest is exactly what makes room for a supplier like Pakistan to sell to Mr. Haftar without objection from either patron.Sudan’s Shifting PipelineThe second deal, nearing completion in January and worth roughly $1.5 billion, would send Karakoram-8 light attack aircraft, more than 200 drones and advanced air-defense systems to Sudan’s army, which has spent close to three years fighting the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces.Reports first emerged in January that the agreement was in its final stages, with a retired Pakistani air marshal describing it as effectively done. Saudi Arabia was widely seen to be facilitating, and possibly financing, the purchase.The picture then grew murkier. Reporting in April indicated that Saudi Arabia had pulled its financing. It asked Pakistan to shelve the agreement altogether, amid what sources described as a broader reassessment of Riyadh’s posture toward the wars in both Sudan and Libya.Whether the pipeline is now paused or proceeding is unclear from outside the negotiating room, with Saudi Arabia’s April withdrawal the last confirmed word on its status. What’s not in dispute is that the war has killed tens of thousands, displaced millions, and drawn accusations of mass atrocities by the Rapid Support Forces.For Washington, Libya is one thing. Sudan, by contrast, cuts closer to core American interests, touching a live humanitarian catastrophe and Washington’s own long-running effort to isolate Islamist factions in the region.“Washington should be concerned, in principle and in general, about alien national agendas playing out in Africa. Russia and Iran, of course, already wrong-footed the U.S. in the Sahelian states of Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger. There is a recklessness about how these agendas play out, complicating rather than resolving existing problems,” Mr. Fitton-Brown says.From this perspective, it is “difficult to see much material harm to U.S. interests from Pak-KSA-Turkish dabbling with both sides in Libya, while Sudan is a more serious matter.”“Support for the Sudanese Armed Forces undermines U.S. policy against the Muslim Brotherhood and risks aggravating the worst humanitarian crisis in the world. U.S. pressure is already being brought to bear on Pakistan over Sudan,” Mr. Fitton-Brown underscores. Sudan also offers Pakistan something Libya cannot: a live battlefield on which to demonstrate its hardware against an adversary using large numbers of drones, the kind of combat data that helps sell jets to the next customer.“A theater like Sudan offers all three parties an environment that satisfies everyone’s geopolitical interests. Turkey needs to expand their weapons sales, access to the Red Sea and allies to support their presence in Somalia,” Mr. Carvajal continues. “Pakistan can use Sudan as a testing ground for its weapons, financial gains through Saudi Arabia and a new partner along the Red Sea. Saudi Arabia wants to ensure Gulf rivals don’t make further gains across East Africa, at any cost.”The arms sales are transactions, yet the pact signed at Mecca is meant to make them durable.A New Axis Takes ShapeThe Mecca Pact formalizes a relationship that has been building for nearly a year. Saudi Arabia and Pakistan signed a bilateral mutual defense agreement in September 2025, weeks after Israel struck Hamas targets in Qatar and rattled Gulf states already uncertain about America’s staying power as their principal security guarantor.Turkey’s inclusion this month extends that arrangement to a country with NATO’s second-largest army and a fast-growing drone industry. Regional security analysts have cautioned the pact is not a formal alliance on the scale of NATO. Yet, even skeptics acknowledge it gives Riyadh a wider web of partnerships to lean on as it manages an emboldened Iran and doubts about Washington’s reliability.Pakistan’s incentives are as transactional as they are strategic.Its air force’s performance against India last May, when Pakistani pilots claimed to have downed multiple Indian jets in aerial skirmishes, gave Islamabad a marketing showcase for its JF-17 fighter. The cash-strapped country has since been shopping the jet and related hardware across the Middle East, Africa and even South Asia, with talks reportedly underway involving Bangladesh and Indonesia.Ultimately, years of energy-price pressure and a 25th International Monetary Fund program have strained Pakistan’s economy. Saudi financing has supplied what its defense industry lacks on its own: the capital to chase distant, high-risk markets like Sudan and Libya that it otherwise has the manpower and manufacturing base to serve, but not the money to reach on its own.Turkey, for its part, offers the prospect of technology transfers. Saudi Arabia, meanwhile, offers something broader — funding that reaches well past the battlefield, plus the leverage over India that Islamabad has sought for decades.For Washington, the emerging arrangement complicates a relationship with Pakistan built on decades on counterterrorism cooperation and, more recently, on renewed defense sales, including a $686 million package approved in December.The State Department has not commented publicly on the Libya or Sudan agreements, and Pakistan’s foreign and defense ministries have repeatedly declined to confirm details of either sale.What is increasingly clear, however, is that Islamabad’s rise as an arms exporter is no longer a peripheral story. Rather, it hovers at the intersection of America’s Gulf security partnership with Saudi Arabia and two of Africa’s deadliest, most stubborn wars — both unfolding largely outside the public accounting that would normally accompany a partner state’s weapons reaching an embargoed warlord and a military fighting an insurgency accused of atrocities.Whether the new three-way pact deepens that trajectory or merely papers over its contradictions remains an open question.“It’s unlikely to change it much, more likely to confirm and underpin it. But contradictions remain,” Mr. Fitton-Brown says. “The three partners are only partially aligned. And the defense dimension has already been found wanting over Houthi attacks on Saudi Arabia. So, depending upon whether external events drive the three apart or closer together, we will see their African agendas diverge or converge and accelerate.”

Pakistan Is Selling Billions in Weapons Across Africa. Washington Should Be Paying Attention

Pakistan Is Selling Billions in Weapons Across Africa. Washington Should Be Paying Attention

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