In a televised briefing on Sunday, foreign minister Ishaq Dar said Islamabad was “happy” that Washington and Tehran had agreed to peace talks facilitated by the South Asian nation in the coming days. These, he added, would be “meaningful talks” for “a comprehensive settlement”.
Dar was speaking after a multilateral meeting with his counterparts from Turkey, Egypt and Saudi Arabia, the regional powers seeking to return stability to the Middle East amid the escalating war against Iran launched by the US and Israel a month ago.
“Pakistan is very happy that both Iran and the US have expressed their confidence in Pakistan to facilitate their talks,” the minister said.
Islamabad, Dar added, was also “engaged with the US leadership in our efforts to deescalate the situation and find a solution to the conflict”.
Neither Washington nor Tehran has so far confirmed Islamabad’s role as the potential mediator.
Pakistan has positioned itself as a big player in brokering peace in the most consequential conflict in the world, leveraging improved ties with the US under president Donald Trump and its longstanding friendship with Iran.
Its emergence as a potential mediator, however, has surprised many given the South Asian country’s perceived instability and unreliability on the international stage.
Chietigj Bajpaee, a senior research fellow for South Asia at Chatham House, tells The Independent Pakistan’s mediation attempt is ambitious but deeply constrained.
“I think there are a lot of internal contradictions, and the challenge is ensuring Pakistan’s ambition to play the role of a mediator doesn’t collapse under the weight of these contradictions, internal and in the broader regional context as well.
“Regionally, it is in the midst of a conflict with Afghanistan and there is an irony in Pakistan offering to mediate between the US and Iran and Iran offering to mediate between Afghanistan and Pakistan. It also continues to have poor relations with India in the aftermath of last year’s four-day conflict,” he says.
What also makes its outreach awkward, Bajpaee says, is that Pakistan doesn’t have any diplomatic relations with Israel, a key party to the conflict, while it maintains close ties to both the US and the Gulf Arab states, including a defence agreement with Saudi Arabia, undermining its neutral status.
“It is hard to see it as a neutral mediator,” he says. “It has at times had strained relations with Iran as seen in the brief skirmishes in 2024 over Baloch separatist movements on both sides of the border.”
Another analyst sees this as a diplomatic turnaround for a country once isolated by the US for harbouring Osama bin Laden and dismissed by Trump, during his first term, as a bad-faith actor that had given Washington nothing but “lies and deceit”.
“Pakistan hosting US–Iran talks represents a major upgrade in Islamabad’s strategic standing,” says Kamran Bokhari, a senior resident fellow at the Middle East Policy Council in Washington. “After decades of being a troubled state, Pakistan appears to be re-emerging as a major American ally in West Asia.”
In spite of limited history in mediating high-profile crises, analysts say Pakistan carries “unusual credibility” due to its workable ties with both the US and Iran.
Pakistan maintains steady relations with Iran as a neighbour, sharing a sensitive border along its southwestern Balochistan province, the site of insurgencies on both sides. The two sides clashed along the border in January 2024 but ties were quickly repaired.
At the same time, Pakistan does not host American military bases, unlike traditional Gulf mediators such as Qatar or Oman, which continue to face the threat of Iranian strikes for this reason.
Islamabad’s relations with the US have come a long way during Trump’s second term, with prime minister Shehbaz Sharif slowly making his way into the US president’s good books.
Sharif was one of the first world leaders to sign up to Trump’s International Board of Peace. He had previously hailed the US president for brokering a ceasefire between India and Pakistan to end last year’s four-day war, unlike India which denied that Washington had played any major role.
Pakistan’s powerful army chief, Asim Munir, has also managed to curry favour with Trump, who has described him as his favourite Pakistani field marshal.
“Pakistan has unusual credibility as a mediator, maintaining workable ties with both Washington and Tehran, while a history of strained relations with each gives it just enough distance to be seen as a credible go-between,” says Adam Weinstein, deputy director of the Middle East programme at the Quincy Institute.
In neighbouring India, however, Pakistan’s emergence as a facilitator has triggered strategic unease, with the opposition accusing the Narendra Modi government of causing diplomatic embarrassment and arguing that Islamabad’s proactive role highlighted Delhi’s fading influence on the international stage despite its far bigger size.
Indian foreign minister S Jaishankar last week told an all-party meeting that India was “not a dalaal nation like Pakistan”, using the Hindi word for broker, rejecting any notion that Delhi should play an intermediary role and framing it as beneath India’s stature.
Bajpaee says India is actually better placed than Pakistan to act as a mediator, given its more neutral position and relations with all key parties, meaning the US, Israel, Iran and the Gulf countries.
Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One late on Sunday that the US was negotiating “directly and indirectly” with Iran, though Tehran insisted that it had not been in any talks with Washington.
“We’re doing extremely well in that negotiation, but you never know with Iran because we negotiate with them and then we always have to blow them up,” he said.
In a previous comment, Iran’s parliament speaker, Mohammad Bagher Qalibaf, dismissed the talks in Pakistan as a cover for the deployment of more American troops to the region.
He said Iranian forces were “waiting for the arrival of American troops on the ground to set them on fire and punish their regional partners forever”, according to state media.
Given that the warring sides are in a fix and conflict appears to be widening, Pakistan’s challenges lie in bridging the chasm between Tehran and Washington.
Bajpaee says there is a “risk of it blowing up in its face” given the limited control but high exposure to consequences inherent in the conflict.
“There is a real risk that this could backfire. So far, Iran has targeted several countries in the region but not Pakistan, likely because Pakistan does not host permanent US military bases,” he says. “However, if Pakistan is seen as aligning too closely with the US, that perception could change.”
Islamabad’s mutual defence pact with Riyadh – signed last September – complicates its chances of posing as a credible and effective mediator, making it a tightrope walk it, he adds.
Tehran has demanded that the US pay reparations for war damages, remove its military bases from the Gulf, and agree to a new security framework for the Strait of Hormuz.
Trump told the Financial Times on Sunday that the US could seize Iran’s oil export hub of Kharg Island as 2,500 marines arrived in the region and a similar-sized contingent on its way.
Iran is leveraging its ability to disrupt the Strait of Hormuz, a key oil and gas route, driving up prices and causing shortages in Asia, while allowing limited tanker passage from select countries.
