It’s often said here that Saudi Arabia is the undisputed leader of the ummah, the worldwide community of Muslims, because its rulers are the custodians of the sacred sites in Mecca and Medina. Pakistan, with its nuclear arsenal, considers itself the guardian of the custodians. We are told that all of us are brothers in faith, but relations really just boil down to the fact that Saudi Arabia is bailing Pakistan out of yet another economic crisis. It’s a happy marriage between God and budget deficits. Prince Mohammed just promised us investments worth $20 billion. One might think that it’s his dad’s money he is spending. But Pakistanis seem to think that since God has blessed Saudi Arabia with so many riches, we are only getting our fair share.

Being promised billions tends to make you forget that the custodian of our sacred cities has caused more misery to the ummah than most nations on this Earth. Not only does Saudi Arabia continue to bomb one of the poorest Muslim countries in the world; it also refuses to pay wages to the poor laborers it imports from Pakistan and elsewhere, or it locks them up and throws away the key. Prince Mohammed won over lots of Pakistani hearts when, after a plea from Mr. Khan , he announced the release of more than 2,000 Pakistani prisoners from Saudi jails. Nobody questioned the merits of a justice system in which a prince can release thousands of prisoners because he is in a good mood. How many can he jail when he is having a bad day?

After declaring the prince a great modernizer and a “global thinker,” the West got a rude shock when it heard that he may have ordered Mr. Khashoggi’s gruesome murder . He had been exalted in these pages and many other places. The media coverage both before and after the murder has turned Prince Mohammed into an international brand.

His victory tour of Asia comes as India is threatening Pakistan with revenge for a suicide attack in Kashmir that killed more than 40 Indian soldiers last week. (There was another deadly attack on Monday.) Nobody is expecting the prince to do anything about Pakistan and India being on the brink of a war yet again. Like all little princes he does not have to pick sides or make a choice. When he visits India this week, he is expected to sign more investment deals. The Pakistani government calls his visit historic, and Indian officials call it historic. But only people with no sense of history call every passing chariot a historic event. The prince is playing with Pakistan and India because he is being temporarily snubbed by the boys and girls of the West, the ones he really wanted to play with.

This visit brings back old memories of when, following the Iranian revolution and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, Saudi Arabia started giving Pakistan lots of money to fight the communists, bringing fortunes to a few people and a rabid and enduring sectarianism to the rest. In Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia matched the United States dollar for dollar, and together they spawned a multinational jihad complex that still haunts the world.