Why EU–Pakistan Defence Cooperation Matters Now
The EU's 2019 Strategic Engagement Plan provides the framework for security cooperation, but Pakistan's strategic culture, shaped by the military since 1947, poses both opportunities and limits for partnership.
1. Introduction
Relations between the European Union (EU) and the Islamic Republic of Pakistan have predominantly been analysed in the literature along the axes of trade (GSP+), migration governance, and development assistance, while the security and defence dimension remains a comparatively understudied field. Yet the existing institutional architecture has attained a degree of maturity that necessitates systematic analysis of this dimension. İsmail Polat's chapter entitled "Pakistan Armed Forces," published in the edited volume Military Systems in the 21st Century (Vol. II) by the National Defence University Press, provides a suitable empirical foundation for such an analysis. According to the data presented by Polat, Pakistan ranks as the world's ninth-largest military power with a score of 0.1711 on the Global Firepower index and constitutes the sole nuclear-capable state in the Islamic world; since 1947, the military has functioned as the state's most consequential institution and the principal shaper of its strategic culture.
The current conjuncture renders this assessment all the more pertinent. Following the four-day conflict with India in May 2025, which involved missile and unmanned aerial vehicle strikes, Pakistan increased its defence budget for the 2025–26 fiscal year by 20 per cent, raising it to 2.55 trillion rupees (approximately USD 9 billion). On the EU side, the treatment of counter-terrorism cooperation at the 8th EU–Pakistan Strategic Dialogue, held in Islamabad on 1 June 2026, as part of the broader security engagement under the 2019 Strategic Engagement Plan confirms the institutionalisation of the security agenda between the two parties. This study examines the potential of such cooperation across three domains — counter-terrorism; maritime security and multilateral operations; and defence industry and arms control — relating, in each domain, the capacity data presented by Polat to the EU's existing policy instruments.
2. Counter-Terrorism Cooperation: Articulating Operational Experience with an Institutional Framework
Counter-terrorism constitutes the most institutionalised channel of the EU–Pakistan security relationship. Polat documents that, after 2001, the Pakistan Armed Forces shifted their focus from the paradigm of conventional confrontation with India towards internal and external counter-terrorism operations; within this framework, more than 72,000 troops were deployed along the western border, and successive operational campaigns were conducted from the Swat Valley to North Waziristan. The author's comparative observation is analytically significant: while the United States, Russia, and the United Kingdom possess extensive expeditionary experience, the internal-security and border-operations experience that Pakistan has accumulated under arduous geographical and political conditions — in both conventional and asymmetric warfare environments — is qualitatively distinct.
The EU-side counterpart to this accumulated expertise is a regularly functioning dialogue mechanism. The ninth round of the EU–Pakistan Counter-Terrorism Dialogue, convened in Brussels in February 2025, encompassed regional risks ranging from the security implications of the situation in Afghanistan to the Middle East; the parties identified concrete areas for joint action on preventing and countering violent extremism, the recruitment and movement of foreign fighters, online and offline radicalisation, and combating terrorism financing. Furthermore, at the 8th Strategic Dialogue both sides emphasised that Afghan territory must not be used to threaten or attack other countries and called upon the de facto authorities in Afghanistan to take effective and verifiable action against all terrorist groups — indicating a notable convergence in threat perception. Newly established institutional structures introduced by Polat, such as the Pakistan Air Force Cyber Command (PAFCC), may in turn be regarded as prospective interlocutors within an expanding EU–Pakistan security agenda that encompasses emerging threats such as cybersecurity and violent extremism.
3. Maritime Security and Multilateral Peace Operations: Normative Convergence and Interoperability
The second domain of potential comprises maritime security and peacekeeping operations under the auspices of the United Nations (UN). According to the organisational data reported by Polat, the Pakistan Navy is structured around the missions of securing maritime trade, combating piracy, and protecting strategic ports and naval bases, and ranks fifth globally with a personnel strength of 124,800. This capacity, projecting into the Arabian Sea and the Indian Ocean, creates a geographical and functional area of intersection with the EU's maritime security operations in the Gulf of Aden and the Western Indian Ocean (EUNAVFOR Atalanta); the security of sea lines of communication (SLOCs) is among the rare domains in which the commercial and strategic interests of the two actors converge.
In the peacekeeping dimension, Pakistan's record is also quantitatively documented: according to Polat's data, the Pakistan Armed Forces have participated in 46 UN peacekeeping missions across 29 countries since 1948 and lost 168 personnel in these deployments; the country ranks among the leading troop-contributing states to UN peacekeeping forces. This experience — spanning the Congo (1960–64), UNPROFOR (1992–96), and the Kosovo missions — offers common ground with the EU's Common Security and Defence Policy (CSDP) missions at the levels of training standards, crisis-management doctrine, and interoperability. Convergence is likewise evident at the normative level: both sides welcomed the unanimous adoption of Resolution 2788, passed in July 2025 under Pakistan's presidency of the UN Security Council, which reaffirmed the collective commitment to preventive diplomacy and the peaceful settlement of disputes, while EU High Representative Kaja Kallas further commended Pakistan's constructive role in mediation efforts between the United States and Iran, including its hosting of the Islamabad Talks. This normative alignment strengthens the political foundation for prospective joint peace-support activities.
4. Defence Industry, Military Education, and Arms Control: Dynamics of Diversification
The third domain concerns defence-industrial cooperation and arms-control regimes. The inventory analysis presented by Polat demonstrates that the European defence industry is already embedded in Pakistan's procurement architecture: the navy's submarine force comprises seven French-origin Agosta 90-class platforms, while the air force inventory includes 90 Mirage 5EF/F/PA and 69 Mirage III EP/PF/RP French-origin aircraft; France, Italy, the United Kingdom, and Romania are cited among the navy's suppliers. Nevertheless, the asymmetry in the procurement structure is pronounced: as Polat reports on the basis of Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) data, Pakistan alone absorbed 38 per cent of Chinese arms exports during the 2016–2020 period. Considering the approximately USD 2.5 billion allocated to equipment acquisition in the 2025–26 budget and the 300-billion-rupee Armed Forces Development Programme, a structural area of intersection emerges between a Pakistan seeking procurement diversification and a Europe in the process of expanding its defence-industrial base — particularly in the segments of modernisation, electronic warfare, radar systems, and naval platforms.
In the dimension of military education, the institutional infrastructure documented in detail by Polat — the Pakistan Military Academy, founded in 1947, the Command and Staff College in Quetta dating back to 1905, and the navy's War College affiliated with the National Defence University — constitutes a ready foundation for officer-exchange and joint training programmes. At the level of arms control, the relationship's most sensitive yet most critical channel is operative: the EU–Pakistan Security Dialogue, whose establishment was agreed at the 6th Strategic Dialogue, incorporates sub-groups on Non-Proliferation and Disarmament and on Counter-Terrorism. As Polat reports, drawing on the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists data of Kristensen, Korda, and Johns, Pakistan possesses approximately 170 nuclear warheads and is not a party to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT). The May 2025 conflict, by concretely demonstrating the escalation risks between two nuclear powers, transforms this dialogue channel, from the EU's perspective, from a normative preference into a strategic imperative.
5. Conclusion
An analysis of EU–Pakistan defence cooperation requires that potential and structural limits be assessed in conjunction. The constraining factors are evident: the EU is not a military alliance; Pakistan's primary defence partners are China and the Gulf states; and the human-rights agenda inherent in GSP+ conditionality, together with the deepening strategic relations of EU member states with India, narrows Brussels' room for manoeuvre. Nonetheless, the existing institutional architecture — a counter-terrorism dialogue that has completed nine rounds, a security dialogue incorporating a disarmament sub-group, and a strategic dialogue that convened its eighth round in 2026 — offers three concrete axes of deepening: (i) matching Pakistan's field-acquired counter-terrorism and asymmetric-warfare experience with the EU's prevention and capacity-building instruments; (ii) converting the accumulated expertise in maritime security and UN peace operations into interoperability within the CSDP framework; and (iii) positioning the European defence industry, with a focus on modernisation and training, in a Pakistani market seeking procurement diversification.
The approach of "defence diplomacy and integrated deterrence" that Polat proposes in the Turkish context provides, mutatis mutandis, an equally valid analytical framework for the EU: engagement with an actor that maintains one of the world's largest armies with 654,000 active personnel and is markedly increasing its defence expenditure proves sustainable when constructed upon dialogue, education, and confidence-building prior to arms transfers. Within this framework, future research examining the effects of the post-May 2025 transformation of the South Asian security architecture on the EU's regional engagement strategy, as well as the interaction between GSP+ conditionality and security cooperation, would constitute a valuable contribution to the literature.
Primary Source: Polat, İsmail. "Pakistan Armed Forces" [Pakistan Silahlı Kuvvetleri]. In Military Systems in the 21st Century, Vol. II [21. Yüzyılda Askerî Sistemler, Cilt II] (pp. 743–779). Ankara: National Defence University Press.
Alvara Merrick
Contributing writer at EUReflect.
