RIYADH: Some key members of the 34-nation anti-Daesh (ISIS) coalition announced by Saudi Arabia have a fundamental question: just what is it? Indonesia did not know it was going to be a military alliance, which it does not want to join. A senior Pakistani lawmaker only learned the news from a Reuters reporter.

And while Western governments welcomed this week’s initiative, there was uncertainty over how it would work.

“We look forward to learning more about what Saudi Arabia has in mind in terms of this coalition,” U.S. Defense Secretary Ash Carter said Tuesday.

Comments from several of the countries that signed up to the initiative appeared to reveal a lack of preparation by Riyadh, which approached partners with an invitation to join a coordination center but then announced a military alliance.

When Saudi Arabia’s Deputy Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman announced the new group at a sudden midnight news conference, he called it an “Islamic military coalition,” a description that appeared to surprise some of the governments involved.

Armanatha Nasir, Foreign Ministry spokesman for Indonesia, said the Saudi foreign minister had approached Jakarta twice in the past few days to ask it to join a “center to coordinate against extremism and terrorism.”

However, “what Saudi Arabia has announced is a military alliance. ... It is thus important for Indonesia to first have details before deciding to support it,” he said. Jakarta had not yet decided whether to join the group.

Chief Security Minister Luhut Pandjaitan said later: “We don’t want to join a military alliance.”

In a Tuesday meeting with reporters, Saudi Foreign Minister Adel al-Jubeir painted the coalition as a grouping that would allow member states to request or offer assistance among themselves in fighting groups they designate as terrorists.

Such assistance could include military force, financial aid, materiel or security expertise, Jubeir said, and would have a permanent base in the Saudi capital Riyadh. However, more detailed specifics of the plan were still under discussion.

Of the 34 countries Riyadh said had signed up for its coalition, several of those contacted by Reuters appeared to have different conceptions of what it would actually entail, while some said they had not been officially notified.

Pakistani Senator Sehar Kamran, who is on the Senate defense committee and lived in Saudi Arabia for many years, said a phone call from Reuters was the first she had heard of the alliance.

“I haven’t seen the news yet,” she said. Asked if this had been debated in the Senate or National Assembly, she said: “No. Not yet.”

The country’s Foreign Secretary Aizaz Chaudhry was quoted in the daily newspaper Dawn as saying he had been surprised to read of Islamabad’s inclusion and was seeking details from Riyadh.

That confused approach to the project may undermine its goal, not only of creating an effective group to fight militancy, but of assuaging Western fears that Muslim countries are indifferent to the threat posed by Daesh.

In recent weeks, media and politicians in Western countries have complained about what they see as Saudi Arabia’s failure to match their own focus on destroying Daesh militarily or to combat its militant Islamist ideology.

They have painted Saudi Arabia’s Wahhabi school of Islam as the ideological wellspring of extremism and said its decision to wage war in Yemen instead of deploying more force against extremists shows it does not see that threat as a priority.

Riyadh has always disputed such accusations, pointing to its jailing of Daesh supporters, its use of top preachers to decry extremist groups, its participation in air raids in Syria and its work with the U.S. to counter militant funding channels.

“The kingdom of Saudi Arabia has been subject to criticism in Europe, and France in particular, with regard to extremism and Daesh, and I think it is based on not knowing the facts,” Foreign Minister Jubeir said Tuesday.

Diplomats in Riyadh said the Saudi focus on Yemen instead of Syria arose partly because it regarded its neighbor’s civil war as a more immediate threat to its own security and partly because it disagreed with the strategy against Daesh.

In Saudi Arabia, the coalition proposal was quickly endorsed by the Council of Senior Scholars, the grouping of top imams in the conservative Islamic kingdom, which issued a statement urging all other Muslim states to join the grouping.

Jubeir said the anti-terrorism group would not only include a military, security and intelligence track, but an ideological one as well. Whether more statements by the Wahhabi preachers denouncing militancy will allay Western criticism, though, is doubtful.

Western media often overstate the degree to which Wahhabi teachings resemble the far more extreme positions of Daesh, and fail to note the war of words and accusations of apostasy between Saudi religious authority and extremist preachers.

But Saudi officials in turn rarely acknowledge the links between militant thought and their own faith’s propagation of intolerance toward others. Modern militant groups follow an extreme interpretation of Islam’s Salafi branch, of which Wahhabism was the original strain, and whose preachers regard Shiism as heresy, laud the concept of jihad, urge hatred of infidels and back harsh penalties for religious offenses.

One driving force of support for Daesh has been a rise in sectarian anger, much of it driven by the proxy wars emerging from a political struggle between Sunni Saudi Arabia and Shiite Iran.

In that context, the absence from Riyadh’s coalition of Iran and its allies Iraq and Syria seemed to suggest that it may hope eventually to use its Muslim coalition against terrorism as a Sunni bloc that could isolate Tehran’s Arab Shiite proxies.

Riyadh describes Iraq’s Popular Mobilization Shiite militias, which have been accused of killing Sunni civilians but are all enemies of Daesh on the battlefield, and Lebanon’s Hezbollah as terrorist groups.

“Actually, I think this is partly about Shiite terrorism, because nobody is putting any effort into fighting that,” said Mustafa Alani, a security expert with close ties to Saudi Arabia’s Interior Ministry.

Whether such a goal would be shared by most of Riyadh’s new partners in its much vaunted coalition, a group that includes countries which have amicable ties with Iran, appears unlikely.