Rawalpindi-Riyadh embrace

BRUCE RIEDEL, fellow at Brookings' Saban Center states that understanding the Saudi-Pakistani relationship was important to understand the future of both the countries, the nuclear balance in Near East and South Asia and the crisis in Pakistan and Saudi Arabia today.
In an op-ed for Force, "Enduring Allies", he states that Riyadh-Rawalpindi relationship was a longstanding, intimate alliance, with a decades-old strategic military relationship, an as yet unacknowledged nuclear partnership to provide Riyadh with a nuclear deterrent at short notice, if needed.
He states that Pakistan was the largest recipient of Saudi aid outside the Arab world and the Pakistani madarsa system was funded by the kingdom's Wahabbi clergy while Rawalpindi provided military expertise and resources, augmented by close intelligence and security relations and apprehensions about a Shia Iran.
He concludes that turmoil both in the Arab World as well as Pakistan and tensions with Washington were impelling the House of Saud and Pakistan towards even closer partnership.

Countering Takfiri ideology

JESSICA STERN of the Harvard Law School recommends that Governments' arsenal against jihadist terror include arguments based on Islamic theology and ethics that refuted terrorism and strengthened the resilience of vulnerable populations. In an article in Foreign Affairs, "Mind Over Martyr - How to Redicalize Islamic Extremists", she claims that Saudi Arabia had rehabilitated and reintegrated over 4000 militants into the mainstream of society and this program contained lessons for Western and other governments to emulate and minimize the threat of Islamic fundamentalism.