Islamabad, Pakistan – In the course of 1971, on the peak of the Chilly Conflict, a Pakistani authorities aircraft carrying US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger flew in a single day from Islamabad to Beijing. The journey was secret, the facilitator was Pakistan, and the geopolitical penalties have been generational.
Greater than 50 years later, Pakistan is as soon as once more carrying messages. International Minister Ishaq Dar confirmed on March 25 that Islamabad is relaying a US 15-point ceasefire proposal to Tehran, with Turkiye and Egypt offering extra diplomatic help, because the US-Israeli struggle in opposition to Iran stretches into its second month.
On Thursday, chief US negotiator Steve Witkoff additionally confirmed that Pakistan was transferring messages between Washington and Tehran. Hours later, President Donald Trump introduced on his social media platform, Fact Social, a 10-day pause on threatened strikes in opposition to Iranian energy vegetation, citing, in his phrases, a request from the Iranian authorities.
Iran has thus far denied that direct negotiations are going down, however Trump’s newest pause signifies that his preliminary menace to assault Iran’s energy vegetation, delivered final weekend, has now been deferred twice, as Pakistan performs the a part of a key diplomatic facilitator.
The position is just not new. Pakistan brokered the key US-China backchannel in 1971 and was a key interlocutor within the Geneva Accords that helped finish the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan within the Nineteen Eighties. It additionally facilitated talks that led to the 2020 Doha Settlement and has, throughout successive governments, tried to mediate between Saudi Arabia and Iran.
Because the launch of Operation Epic Fury, the US-Israeli air marketing campaign that started in late February 2026 and killed Supreme Chief Ali Khamenei inside days, Islamabad has quietly however deeply inserted itself into the disaster, working the telephones and holding conferences with key regional actors.
Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif has spoken repeatedly to Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian. Military Chief Subject Marshal Asim Munir has held a minimum of one direct name with President Donald Trump. Each Sharif and Munir have additionally travelled to Saudi Arabia, with whom Pakistan signed a mutual defence settlement in September final 12 months, and which hosts a US base and has confronted Iranian assaults in current weeks.
“Pakistan’s story is advised most frequently by way of the prism of battle,” says Naghmana Hashmi, a former Pakistani ambassador to China. “But beneath the headlines of coups, crises, and border skirmishes runs a quieter, extra constant thread: a state that has repeatedly tried to show its geography and Muslim-world ties into diplomatic leverage for peace,” she advised Al Jazeera.
Whether or not this newest spherical of diplomacy produces something sturdy stays unsure. However it has as soon as once more raised a well-known query: How and why does Pakistan hold rising as a diplomatic dealer, and the way efficient has it been?
Opening the China channel
In August 1969, US President Richard Nixon visited Pakistan and quietly tasked the nation’s navy ruler, President Yahya Khan, with passing a message to Beijing: Washington wished to open communication with the Folks’s Republic of China.
On the time, the US handled Taiwan as China and didn’t recognise Beijing.
Pakistan was chosen for the diplomatic position as a result of it maintained working relations with each Washington and Beijing.
Winston Lord, who served as Kissinger’s aide and was on the flight to Beijing, described the choice in a 1998 oral historical past interview carried out by the Affiliation for Diplomatic Research and Coaching.
“We lastly settled on Pakistan. Pakistan had the benefit of being a buddy to either side,” he stated.
Two years of oblique exchanges adopted, with Pakistani officers carrying messages between the 2 capitals.
Then, in July 1971, Kissinger arrived in Islamabad on a public tour of Asia. In keeping with historic information and accounts from key individuals, he appeared to fall ailing at a welcome dinner.
Within the early hours of July 9, Yahya Khan’s driver took Kissinger and three aides to a navy airfield, the place a Pakistani authorities aircraft was ready with 4 Chinese language representatives on board. The plane flew to Beijing in a single day, whereas a decoy automotive headed to the hill resort of Nathia Gali, about three hours from Islamabad.
Kissinger spent 48 hours in conferences with Chinese language chief Zhou Enlai earlier than returning to Pakistan. The journey paved the way in which for Nixon’s go to to Beijing in February 1972, and the well-known handshake with Chinese language chief Mao Zedong that led to a detente between the 2 international locations, and the US recognition of communist China.
Kissinger later acknowledged in an interview with information journal The Atlantic that the Nixon administration had declined to publicly condemn Pakistani military actions in East Pakistan, which contributed to the creation of Bangladesh in December 1971.
In keeping with him, doing so “would have destroyed the Pakistani channel, which might be wanted for months to finish the opening to China, which certainly was launched from Pakistan”.
Masood Khan, who served as Pakistan’s ambassador to america and later to the United Nations, says the episode mirrored one thing structural.
“In 1971, Pakistan was the one nation that might be trusted concurrently in Washington and Beijing with a really delicate mission, which was stored secret even from the State Division,” he advised Al Jazeera.
“However past belief, Pakistan had additionally acquired the requisite strategic manoeuvrability and operational flexibility that swimsuit interlocutors caught in an apparently irredeemable state of affairs,” Khan added.
Muhammad Faisal, a Sydney-based overseas coverage analyst, known as it Pakistan’s defining diplomatic second.
“Pakistan’s facilitation of the US-China backchannel is unambiguously probably the most consequential. It restructured Chilly Conflict geopolitics in ways in which nonetheless outline the worldwide order. No different Pakistani facilitation comes shut in scale or permanence,” he stated.
However he additionally factors to its limits.
“Pakistan couldn’t flip that help from each powers to its benefit within the 1971 civil battle and the next struggle with India. Regardless of being on good phrases with each China and the US, Pakistan couldn’t deter India from making the most of the civil battle,” he added.
Pakistan’s position in Afghan diplomacy spans 4 a long time and doesn’t at all times match neatly into the class of impartial brokering.
An early occasion got here within the Nineteen Eighties, following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979.
Pakistan grew to become the first conduit for US, Saudi and Chinese language navy and monetary help to the Afghan mujahideen, with its intelligence company, the Inter-Providers Intelligence (ISI), organising and directing the resistance.
From June 1982, a United Nations-mediated course of started in Geneva. Since Pakistan refused to recognise the Soviet-backed Kabul authorities, negotiations have been carried out not directly.
The Geneva Accords have been finally signed on April 14, 1988, by the overseas ministers of Afghanistan and Pakistan, with america and the Soviet Union as guarantors. They set a timetable for Soviet withdrawal, accomplished by February 1989.
As Khan noticed, Pakistan occupied a twin position. “It was each a stakeholder and a mediator,” he stated, a distinction that may form its Afghan coverage for many years.
Almost three a long time later, in July 2015, Pakistan hosted the primary formally acknowledged direct talks between the Taliban and the Afghan authorities of then-President Ashraf Ghani in Murree, close to Islamabad, with US and Chinese language officers attending as observers.
The Taliban, who had dominated Afghanistan from 1996 till being overthrown after the 9/11 assaults in 2001, have been then waging a revolt in opposition to US and NATO forces. Pakistan, broadly seen as having affect over the group, performed a key facilitating position.
Throughout the subsequent US-Taliban negotiations that led to the Doha Settlement in 2020, Pakistan’s involvement was much less seen however remained central.
US envoy Zalmay Khalilzad repeatedly acknowledged that Pakistani strain on Taliban management helped maintain the talks.
Faisal stated it’s unclear what the settlement delivered for Pakistan.
“Pakistan did deliver the Taliban interlocutors to the desk. Nonetheless, the result, the rushed US exit and the Taliban takeover, didn’t safe Pakistan’s personal medium-to-long time period pursuits,” he stated.
At present, Pakistan and the Taliban-ruled Afghanistan are locked in a struggle, each firing at one another. And the Taliban has grown near Pakistan’s South Asian rival, India.
Saudi-Iran: efforts with out outcomes
Few diplomatic efforts have absorbed extra Pakistani vitality with much less to point out than makes an attempt to ease tensions between Riyadh and Tehran, say analysts.
In January 2016, after protesters ransacked Saudi diplomatic missions in Iran, then-Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, elder brother of present premier Shehbaz, flew to each capitals in a single journey alongside then-Military chief Normal Raheel Sharif.
Inside days, nevertheless, Saudi International Minister Adel al-Jubeir publicly denied that any formal mediation had been agreed.
In October 2019, after drone and missile assaults on Saudi Aramco services at Abqaiq and Khurais quickly halved the dominion’s oil output, Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan undertook shuttle diplomacy between Tehran and Riyadh.
Khan stated that Trump, then in his first time period, had personally requested him to “facilitate some form of dialogue”. Iranian officers stated on the time they have been unaware of any formal mediation course of.
When China brokered the restoration of Saudi-Iran diplomatic ties in Beijing in March 2023, Pakistan’s International Workplace famous that the primary direct contact between the 2 sides since 2016 had taken place on the sidelines of a summit of Islamic international locations hosted by Islamabad a 12 months earlier.
Khan, the diplomat, rejects the view that China’s position within the 2023 breakthrough represented a Pakistani failure.
“China ought to get all of the credit score for the end result of the Iran-Saudi rapprochement, however Beijing would recognise that Pakistan paved the way in which for it,” he stated.
“Pakistan’s forte is opening channels, constructing confidence, and internet hosting oblique, proximity talks. This sort of facilitation is foundational in any form of mediation and subsequent conciliation, arbitration, and agreements,” he added.
Try at peace in Center East
In September 2005, Pakistan’s International Minister Khurshid Mahmud Kasuri met his Israeli counterpart Silvan Shalom in Istanbul, marking the primary publicly acknowledged official contact between the 2 international locations.
In his memoir, Neither a Hawk Nor a Dove, Kasuri described the assembly as an try to show Pakistan’s nonrecognition of Israel into diplomatic leverage, utilizing its credibility in Arab and Muslim capitals as a conduit, contingent on progress in the direction of Palestinian statehood.
Shalom known as the talks “an enormous breakthrough”. However the initiative didn’t survive home opposition.
Protests erupted in Pakistan, which doesn’t recognise Israel. No follow-up assembly happened, and no structured course of emerged.
Recurring diplomacy
Faisal attributes Pakistan’s recurring diplomatic position to enduring structural components.
“Pakistan’s entry is linked to its geography and its regional relationships amid many fault strains that it straddles,” he stated.
“Iran can’t ignore Pakistan as a result of it’s residence to the biggest Shia inhabitants outdoors Iran. For the US, ignoring Pakistan, a nuclear-armed Muslim-majority nation straddling the broader Center East and South Asia with shut ties to China, comes at its personal danger.”
Khan rejects the suggestion — made by some analysts — that Pakistan’s mediation is pushed primarily by Washington.
“To counsel that Pakistan has at all times opted for mediation on the behest of the US is a reductive assemble. Mediation is within the DNA of Pakistan’s diplomacy,” he stated.
“Pakistan doesn’t pursue bloc politics and prefers to take care of equidistant relations with Washington, Beijing, Tehran, Riyadh, and different Gulf states. It’s aligned, however not a camp follower.”
But the present Iran mediation carries increased stakes than most up-to-date efforts.
“Pakistan now enjoys belief in Washington, Tehran and the Gulf capitals,” Khan stated. “No different nation within the area has that form of leverage.”
