Pakistan’s Unreliable Mediation Role Puts Question Marks on US-Iran Negotiations

The more useful question, and the one the past six weeks have forced into the open, is whether a state that is itself militarily entangled on several sides of the conflict can credibly broker its resolution. Realistically, it cannot and Pakistan’s unreliability in the US-Iran peace talks is not a matter of bad faith in any single episode. It is structural and Islamabad has positioned itself as the room where the war ends while holding equities with every party in that room, and no quantity of personal warmth between Field Marshal Asim Munir and Donald Trump can reconcile that contradiction.

The clearest illustration arrived in May, when CBS News, citing US officials, reported that Pakistan had allowed Iranian military aircraft, including an RC-130 reconnaissance variant, to park at the Nur Khan airbase outside Rawalpindi after the April ceasefire, potentially shielding them from American strikes. Pakistan’s response was instructive less for what it denied than for what it conceded. The Foreign Ministry called the reporting “misleading and sensationalised” yet confirmed that Iranian aircraft were on Pakistani soil, attributing their presence to diplomatic logistics around the Islamabad Talks. A mediator does not get to host one belligerent’s combat-capable assets and then ask the other belligerent to treat the arrangement as administrative housekeeping. Senator Lindsey Graham, not a marginal voice in the US Congress, said plainly that if the reporting held, Washington should look for someone else to mediate. However, Trump overrode him within hours, calling the Pakistanis “great”. That split between the President’s instinct and his own party’s security hawks is itself a warning. The mediation rests on a personal relationship rather than an institutional or strategic foundation, and personal relationships are the most perishable currency in statecraft.

The Saudi deployment removes any remaining ambiguity. In mid-May, international media reported that Pakistan had sent roughly 8,000 troops, a squadron of JF-17 fighters, drones and a Chinese HQ-9 air defence system to Saudi Arabia under the mutual defence pact the two governments signed in 2025. This was not a symbolic gesture. It places a Pakistani expeditionary force inside one of the theatre’s frontline states, a state Iran struck during the war. Under the treaty, Defence Minister Khawaja Asif has implied, Pakistan’s nuclear umbrella extends over the Saudi kingdom. It also follows Foreign Minister Ishaq Dar openly reminding Tehran of Pakistan’s defence obligations to Riyadh. A government cannot garrison one side of a regional confrontation and present itself as standing outside it. Islamabad is not directly involved in this conflict, as it is merely a participant in the military balance it claims to be calming.

The rhetorical record compounds the problem. While preparing to host the US-Iran talks, Asif called Israel “evil” and “a curse for humanity” and wrote on social media that those who founded the state should “burn in hell.” He told Pakistan’s parliament that the Muslim world should treat India and Israel as its “true and eternal enemies”. Israel responded by questioning, with some justification, how a government speaking in those terms could claim the neutral arbiter’s chair. A mediator’s credibility depends on the perception that it has no thumb on the scale. Pakistan’s senior defence official spent the mediation period putting both thumbs on it in public, and did so as the official voice of the institution that actually runs the country’s foreign policy.

None of this has been lost on Tehran, which is the detail Washington should weigh most carefully. Ebrahim Rezai of Iran’s parliamentary national security committee said openly that Pakistan is unsuitable as a mediator and lacks the standing for the role, because it always defers to Trump’s interests and will not say anything that crosses Washington. So, the United States doubts Pakistan because it suspects a tilt toward Iran, and Iran doubts Pakistan because it sees a tilt toward Washington. A broker distrusted by both parties is not a broker. It is a message service, and the first round of the Islamabad Talks duly closed without agreement.

This pattern is not an aberration, as it is the operating model for Pakistan. For over four decades, Islamabad has monetised strategic ambiguity, partnering with the United States through the Cold War while cultivating Islamist networks for regional leverage, collecting Western aid through the War on Terror while elements of its establishment were repeatedly tied to militant proxies, and presenting itself as a victim of terrorism whenever confronted with its record as a sponsor of it. The compound in Abbottabad, where Osama bin Laden was found, sits in that lineage, as does Trump’s own 2018 charge that Pakistan had repaid American aid with “lies and deceit”. The relevant point for the current talks is not that Pakistan is uniquely treacherous. It is that Islamabad’s foreign policy is directed by a military establishment that treats ambiguity as an asset to be sold rather than a liability to be resolved. Mediation, for that establishment, is leverage and it has already converted the role into a tariff cut from twenty-nine to nineteen per cent, a critical-minerals agreement covering Balochistan, and rehabilitation from near-pariah status.

For policymakers, the conclusion is uncomfortable but clear. Pakistan can relay messages between Washington and Tehran, which has some value when the two capitals cannot speak directly. However, it cannot be trusted with the substance of a settlement, cannot guarantee delivery, and cannot be relied upon to hold a position once its incentives shift. A credible broker must have no stake in the military balance it is adjusting. Pakistan has a stake in every side of this one. It has troops in Saudi Arabia, Iranian aircraft on its bases, a defence minister rhetorically at war with Israel, and a patron relationship with a US President it is careful never to cross. Washington should use the channel for what it is and build the diplomacy that matters elsewhere, with parties whose interests in the outcome are transparent. Treating Pakistan as a guarantor is how negotiations fail, slowly at first and then all at once.