While the US-Israel-Iran crisis remains in an uneasy logjam with POTUS Donald J. Trump regularly issuing threats of unprecedented attacks while the Iranians exhibit their own form of belligerence riding on the back of years of regional hegemonic dominance, there is one two-bit player that has managed to insert itself in a space where it doesn’t really belong – Pakistan. India’s unfriendly western neighbor has been trying to make itself useful in whichever way possible for two distinct reasons. One, the hate-mongering Pakistani establishment views this as an opportunity to flex its geopolitical muscle after the massive drubbing it received at India’s hands during Operation Sindoor. Two, the already debilitated state perceives its manufactured role as their big ticket to stardom, an ignominious attempt to salvage their economy from utter ruin. On the first count, the failed state of Pakistan has failed again – with their role reduced to nothing but a lowly postman between the Americans and the Iranians. Israel, the third party to the conflict, does not want to be seen anywhere near Pakistan. Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, has made his distaste for the Pakistanis very clear. On the second, it has lost the trust of Islamic yet ideologically pragmatic nations like the UAE, while the Saudis have placed iron clamps around its neck in the form of the defense pact. The inglorious Field Marshal Asim Munir has pretty much ensured that Pakistani soldiers fare no better than mercenaries for hire, this time for the Saudis. This commentary argues that Islamabad’s role in the US-Iran war is shaped less by principled neutrality than by a calculated, and at times incoherent, navigation of competing interests—ideological, economic, military, and domestic, all at once. The “honest broker” framing that has attached itself to Pakistan in recent weeks, besides all the mirth, deserves sustained scrutiny.

When the United States and Israel launched coordinated airstrikes on Iran on 28 February 2026, Pakistan moved swiftly to condemn the attacks while simultaneously reaffirming its strategic partnerships with Washington and Riyadh. The Foreign Ministry issued statements criticizing aggression from “all sides”, a formulation that could be viewed as diplomatically dexterous but substantively evasive. Shehbaz Sharif’s government called the assassination of Ali Khamenei’s closest aide, Ali Larijani, a “clear violation of international law” – a condemnation calibrated to appease a domestic public that overwhelmingly sympathizes with Iran – while the same week, Islamabad was quietly and surreptitiously relaying American proposals to Tehran through backchannel communications.

Herein lies the essential paradox of Pakistan’s rather unreliable position: its usefulness as a mediator is predicated on a studied ambiguity that serves the interests of Islamabad’s ruling elite more than it advances any coherent principle. Pakistan does not recognize Israel. It has a 900-kilometre border with Iran which is routinely used to smuggle contraband petrol and diesel into Pakistan, a significant Shia minority estimated at 15 to 20 per cent of the population which the Sunni ruling class treats with contempt, and an energy dependency on Gulf trade routes that the war has placed under severe strain. It signed a Strategic Mutual Defence Agreement with Saudi Arabia in September 2025—a country whose civilian and oil infrastructure Iran has targeted with drones thus leaving the Saudis woefully ill-disposed towards the Iranian regime. Islamabad has, simultaneously, maintained what analysts have described as “limited alignment without overt military entanglement” with Iran. Each of these relationships pulls in a different direction, tensions that Pakistan has not resolved; on the contrary, it has shamelessly attempted to monetize them.

The country’s diplomatic positioning is perhaps better understood through the lens of what small-state strategy scholars call “hedging”—a deliberate refusal to align fully with any single power bloc, which preserves optionality and extracts concessions from multiple patrons simultaneously. Pakistan has been indulging in unprincipled hedging for decades: hosting American drone operations while negotiating with the Afghan Taliban; maintaining an ostensibly secular facade while nurturing and exporting terrorism across its borders, notably to India and Afghanistan; accepting Chinese capital while advertising itself to Washington as a reliable counterweight to Beijing. The US-Iran war mediation is, in this reading, not a rank departure from Pakistan’s strategic tradition, but perhaps its most unsophisticated expression yet.

Any serious analysis of Pakistan’s role in the Iran war must necessarily grapple with an uncomfortable structural reality: this has been, to a significant degree, the Pakistani military’s diplomatic initiative, not that of the civilian government. Field Marshal Asim Munir – and his cronies, brother-in law and Interior Minister Mohsin Naqvi being central to the scenario – has emerged as the primary figure in Islamabad’s engagement with Washington. His unprecedented private, back-door lunch with Trump at the White House in June 2025 marked the first time an American president had hosted the head of Pakistan’s army unaccompanied by the country’s civilian leadership. That optic was not incidental. While it was later revealed that Munir had paid a lobbyist to make the lunch possible, the civil-military imbalance in Pakistan is not merely a domestic governance problem; it has direct implications for the character of the country’s foreign policy. When a serving military chief can conduct substantive diplomatic engagement directly with a foreign head of state – bypassing, or at minimum overshadowing, the elected prime minister – questions about accountability and mandate arise with some urgency. Pakistan’s mediation in the US-Iran war has been praised in Washington and celebrated in Islamabad, but it has not been subject to meaningful parliamentary oversight or public deliberation. The “shuttle diplomacy” conducted by Foreign Minister Ishaq Dar, and now Naqvi, and the quiet communications brokered through Munir’s personal rapport with the Trump administration represent an executive-military compact that leaves little room for the kind of democratic scrutiny that high-stakes foreign policy interventions typically demand.

The military leadership’s machinations could be – at least temporarily – perceived and widely disseminated in the domestic quarters as a diplomatic victory after the whacking received at India’s hands in May 2025. The warming of US-Pakistan relations – which President Trump has been publicly celebrating – carries specific institutional, strategic and personal benefits for the military: renewed access to American arms, intelligence sharing, and the kind of strategic endorsement that consolidates the army’s domestic political dominance, in addition to the monetary kickbacks the top brass has fattened itself on throughout its fledgling history. The abjectly inglorious war mediation has, in this sense, been extraordinarily useful to Munir’s and his cohort’s institutional project, regardless of whether it produces durable peace.

If there was a single moment that crystallised the fundamental contradictions of Pakistan’s mediating role, it came on 10 April 2026, less than 48 hours before the high-stakes negotiations between American and Iranian officials were set to begin in Islamabad. Defence Minister Khawaja Asif posted a message on X describing Israel as “evil and a curse for humanity”, calling it a “cancerous state on Palestinian land”, and expressing the hope that its founders would “burn in hell”. The post was deleted shortly thereafter, but not before considerable damage was done and Pakistan’s hypocrisy exposed.  The Israeli prime minister’s office called the remarks “outrageous”, rightfully so, and declared them incompatible with the role of a neutral arbiter. Israel’s Ambassador to the United States, Yechiel Leiter, described Asif not as a mediator but as “the problem”. American officials and commentators followed, with former US official Ellie Cohanim drawing attention to the incongruity of a country that “harboured and sheltered the 9/11 mastermind Osama Bin Laden” serving in any mediating capacity, while analyst Emily Schrader argued flatly that Pakistan “should not be permitted to mediate anything”. US Congressman Josh Gottheimer called the rhetoric “vile” and “beyond unacceptable”. Israel’s ambassador to India, Reuven Azar, dismissed Pakistan as merely a facilitator often “used” by the US and of little or no consequence to the outcome of the tripartite conflict underway.

The incident exposed something that optimistic accounts glorifying Pakistan’s dubious role as something of a diplomatic renaissance have tended to elide: that the country’s political class has not abandoned the ideological, fiercely Islamist reflexes that have historically undermined its international credibility. Asif’s language did not merely exceed “standard diplomatic criticism”, as some observers politely noted—it reflected a view of Israel’s legitimacy that is mainstream within Pakistani political culture and society and that sits in fundamental tension with the posture of impartiality that effective mediation requires. The post’s deletion did not erase the sentiment; it merely restored the surface of a diplomatic fiction. This is not a peripheral concern. Mediation, as a practice, depends on a credible commitment to the welfare of all parties at the table. A mediator whose Defence Minister publicly calls one party to the conflict a “cancerous” entity whose founders deserve eternal damnation is not a neutral facilitator—they are a partisan that has temporarily found it expedient to occupy the middle ground. Pakistan’s early condemnation of the US-Israeli strikes may have “won over the Iranians”, as some Pakistani analysts have claimed, but it also signaled, quite clearly, that Islamabad’s neutrality was conditional, ideologically bound, and suspicious.

Pakistan’s rather unreliable mediation effort has, therefore, been driven by a convergence of institutional interests, economic compulsions, and strategic opportunism, navigated primarily by a military establishment with its own domestic agenda. Furthermore, the role of Islamabad’s ever-present Islamist-jihadist problem cannot be overstated. The country’s “neutrality”, while loudly asserted, has been violated repeatedly in plain sight. Its credibility as a mediator rests less on genuine impartiality than on the absence, at this particular moment, of better alternatives as perceived both by the Americans and the Iranians (Israel, as mentioned earlier, has distanced itself from Pakistan’s mediation). The world, desperate for de-escalation and stability in West Asia owing primarily to a burgeoning energy crisis, has been overlooking these inherent contradictions. History, which tends to have a longer memory, may prove less accommodating.