When Pakistani Field Marshal Asim Munir addressed Pakistan’s parliamentary security committee in March 2025, he asked a question that had been hanging over the country for years. “How long will we continue to sacrifice countless lives in the style of a soft state?”
The question was rhetorical. This week, it got an answer he could not have scripted. In the span of 72 hours this week, Munir held a direct phone call with Donald Trump, Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif called Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian and Pakistan pitched its own capital as the venue for what could become the most consequential diplomatic encounter of the decade.
A meeting between senior American and Iranian officials — Vice President JD Vance and White House envoy Steve Witkoff on one side, parliamentary speaker Mohammad Bagher Qalibaf on the other — is being reported, with Islamabad as the proposed stage.
For a country that was exchanging fire with India less than a year ago and is currently running military operations on its western border against Afghanistan, this is a remarkable act of positioning.
Not since Pervez Musharraf’s overnight pivot after September 11 has Pakistan inserted itself into the center of American strategic thinking with this speed or ambition. The difference is that in 2001, Washington came to Pakistan out of necessity. This time, Pakistan came to Washington with an offer.
Conventional wisdom has always held that Oman handles US-Iran engagement. It brokered the back channels that produced the 2015 JCPOA nuclear deal. Qatar built its entire foreign policy brand on being the region’s preferred mediation platform.
Both are small, stable, wealthy Gulf states with no axes to grind. In normal times, they are exactly what you want. But these are not normal times. This is crisis diplomacy under the pressure of active strikes, with a five-day window imposed by Trump’s postponement of attacks on Iran’s power grid.
The moment demands something different — an interlocutor with military heft, a direct line to Washington and enough proximity to Tehran to be credible without being captured. Pakistan uniquely fits that description.
Its structural advantages are real. Pakistan has the second-largest Shia Muslim population in the world after Iran — roughly 40 million people — giving it a sectarian proximity to Tehran that most Sunni-majority states cannot claim or feign. It signed a mutual defence pact with Saudi Arabia last year, lending it credibility in Riyadh and Washington simultaneously.
And unlike Oman or Qatar, Pakistan is a nuclear-armed state mediating between a nuclear aspirant and a nuclear superpower — it has skin in the game in a way that no Gulf trading state ever can. It is Munir who has cultivated a direct personal rapport with Trump, forged during the May 2025 India-Pakistan ceasefire, when the two men spoke repeatedly and Trump emerged publicly claiming credit for the deal.
That episode gave Munir something most foreign leaders spend years pursuing: a personal channel to the Oval Office. In a White House that runs on personal relationships rather than institutional channels, that is not a soft asset. It is the whole game.
There is also a dimension that rarely gets discussed: geography. Pakistan and Iran share a 900-kilometer border running through Balochistan — a province that Iran watches with anxiety given its own restive Baloch population on the other side. For Tehran, a hostile Pakistan is not an abstraction — it is a second front.
At a moment when Iran is absorbing Israeli strikes, managing proxy networks from Yemen to Lebanon and facing the prospect of direct US military action against its power infrastructure, the last thing it can afford is trouble on its eastern border.
Iran needs Pakistan’s goodwill, and Pakistan enters these negotiations with something Doha and Muscat do not have — the implicit ability to make Tehran’s strategic environment worse if the relationship sours. That is not a threat that needs to be made explicitly. It is a structural reality that experienced diplomats understand without it being said.
And it cuts both ways: for Tehran, the very fact that Pakistan is not a neutral Gulf state is part of the appeal. Islamabad offers Iran something Muscat and Doha cannot — a venue with enough strategic weight that engaging there does not feel like capitulation.
The doctrine that built the credibility
But Pakistan was not chosen for its geography alone. It was chosen because, in the past 12 months, it has demonstrated that it is a serious state capable of making hard decisions and absorbing their consequences. That credibility was built by Munir methodically, through moves that were domestically costly and internationally noticed.
When Munir asked how long Pakistan would remain a soft state, he was announcing a doctrine. The previous decade had left the country associated with strategic ambiguity — a state that fought terrorism with one hand and sheltered it with the other. Ending that ambiguity became the project.
The ongoing Operation Ghazab Lil Haq, which has involved Pakistani airstrikes deep inside Afghan territory against Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) positions, is its most visible expression. The strategic signal is unambiguous: Pakistan will pursue threats to its existence regardless of political cost.
The doctrine extends beyond counterterrorism. When Tehreek-e-Labbaik Pakistan — capable of shutting down motorways and laying siege to cities — became a vehicle for extortion and instability, the establishment dismantled its leverage. When sectarian tensions flared, Munir’s response was characteristically blunt: Pakistan is a country for Pakistanis.
Those who seek to import the sectarian politics of the Middle East are unwelcome to do so. The suggestion that Shias who prefer Iran’s model are free to live there was jarring, but deliberate — a signal to Washington, Riyadh and Tel Aviv simultaneously that Pakistan would not become a theater for Iranian influence operations, even while maintaining a functional relationship with Tehran.
That discipline held throughout the Gaza crisis, too. When Arab streets were convulsing and Muslim governments were under immense pressure to rupture ties with Washington, Pakistan held its institutional relationship intact.
It made the appropriate diplomatic noises. It did not break. In a region where Gaza became a loyalty test that many governments failed on their own terms, Pakistan’s steadiness was noted. It is part of why the phone rang on Sunday with Trump on the other end.
The India dimension completes the picture. The four-day war of May 2025 ended in a ceasefire that handed Pakistan a diplomatic advantage that Delhi found humiliating and Islamabad found validating. For Pakistan’s establishment, the episode confirmed what Munir had long argued: closeness to Trump produces strategic leverage.
If Islamabad can now help broker even a temporary framework in the US-Iran standoff, it will have established itself as an indispensable interlocutor across two of the most dangerous theaters in Asia simultaneously — a position it has not occupied since the early years of the Afghan war, and one that permanently disrupts India’s preferred narrative of Pakistan as a failing, peripheral state.
There is also a wider geopolitical consequence. China has been Iran’s biggest economic lifeline and Pakistan’s largest infrastructure investor. If anything, Beijing will be comfortable that its oldest and most reliable partner in the region is the one staging the peace talks — far preferable, from China’s perspective, to a process run entirely through Washington’s Gulf allies with no Chinese equities at the table.
The risks are genuine. Iran has publicly denied that any direct negotiations are taking place, with Iranian parliamentary speaker Mohammad-Bagher Qalibaf dismissing reports as “fake news” aimed at manipulating financial markets. If Tehran publicly rebuffs the offer, the damage to Pakistan is not just diplomatic embarrassment — it is a signal to Washington that Islamabad oversold its access, and that signal is hard to walk back.
The second risk is overreach — Islamabad is mediating a superpower crisis while fighting in Afghanistan, managing a fragile ceasefire with India and running an economy that only recently emerged from an IMF bailout program. The third risk is Trump himself: the same personal rapport that grants access makes Pakistan’s position contingent on a president whose decision-making can shift overnight.
But something has already been settled that cannot be unsettled. Pakistan has shown it can hold a line, deliver under pressure and make itself indispensable to the most consequential actors in the room — and this time, not as a staging ground for someone else’s war, but as the address where a peace might actually begin.
The soft state question has been answered. And the rewards for sustaining this role go well beyond prestige. A Pakistan that is seen as Washington’s indispensable partner in two theaters becomes a different proposition for Gulf investors, multilateral lenders and the sovereign wealth funds whose capital Islamabad desperately needs. Strategic relevance converts into economic confidence in ways that IMF programs alone never can.
The last country to leverage a relationship with an American president into a wholesale reinvention of its strategic position was Saudi Arabia under Mohammed bin Salman. Pakistan’s ambition is comparable. Whether its resources are is the open question.
The stage is bigger than it has ever been. And for the first time in a generation, the world is watching Pakistan not with anxiety, but with expectation.
Omer Azhar is a chartered accountant, former financial due diligence professional and London School of Economics Outstanding Contribution Award winner. His commentary on geopolitics, foreign policy and digital finance has appeared in Asia Times and Nikkei Asia, and he has made broadcast appearances on BBC, India today WION and Dawn News. Follow him on X at @OmerAzhar96
