Nauman Mahmood to run the Makkah defence pact secretariat from Riyadh

Pakistan has the first secretary general of the Makkah Joint Defence Agreement, and it is a retired lieutenant general with a long record on the Afghan border and inside the ISI.

Lt Gen (retd) Nauman Mahmood will head the alliance's secretariat, which is based in Riyadh. The three member countries agreed last month that a Pakistani nominee would lead it.

Who he is

Mahmood was commissioned into the Pakistan Army in September 1987 as a Baloch Regiment officer. He holds a master's degree in War Studies and is a graduate of the Command and Staff College in Egypt and the National Defence University in Islamabad.

His career, in order:

• Instructor and later chief instructor at the Command and Staff College
• As a major general, commanded an infantry division in North Waziristan during counterterrorism operations
• Director General of the ISI's Analysis Directorate, assessing foreign developments for national security
• Promoted lieutenant general in April 2019, then Inspector General of Communications and Information Technology at GHQ
• Commander XI Corps, Peshawar, from December 2019 to November 2021, covering the US withdrawal from Afghanistan and the border fencing
• President of the National Defence University, the institution's 35th head, from 2021 until his retirement in April 2023

The XI Corps and ISI analysis postings are the ones that matter for this job. Both sit exactly where a defence alliance built around border security and threat assessment will spend its time.

What the secretariat does

The alliance is young, and the secretary general's first task is building institutional machinery that does not yet exist: turning political commitments into practical security arrangements, staffing, and standing procedures between the member states' militaries.

That is unglamorous work. It is also the part that decides whether a defence pact means anything in a crisis or stays a signed page.

The context this week

The appointment lands as Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif, speaking at the UN General Assembly, said Pakistan stands shoulder to shoulder with Saudi Arabia in safeguarding its sovereignty and security, and repeated what the government calls unwavering support.

For readers here the practical question is whether the pact changes anything at home. So far it has not shown up in the budget, in a new deployment, or in a rate. If it does, the numbers will appear first in the defence allocation, and you can see how the current tax year works out in our income tax calculator.