Colonel Douglas Macgregor once captured the problem with brutal clarity: relying on Pakistan as a mediator, he said, is like asking a pickpocket to hold your wallet while you tie your shoes. The line may sound excessive, but the recent spectacle surrounding the so-called “Islamabad Talks” between Iran and the United States has made it difficult to dismiss.
For all the diplomatic choreography, media excitement, lavish hospitality and carefully managed optics, the talks produced no meaningful breakthrough between Washington and Tehran. The Iranian and American delegations reportedly did not even face each other directly. Pakistan’s mediators, far from conducting substantive diplomacy, appear to have played the limited role of carrying messages from one room to another.
That alone would not necessarily be fatal. Indirect diplomacy is common in hostile negotiations. The real issue lies elsewhere: in the suspicion that Islamabad was not merely transmitting messages, but manipulating the process. According to local experts, Pakistani intermediaries may have presented the two sides with different draft understandings. More importantly, Field Marshal Asim Munir — Pakistan’s army chief and the real centre of power in Islamabad — is alleged to have played both sides, offering the United States the appearance of cooperation while advising Iran to hold firm.
The parallel with the Doha process is hard to miss. In Afghanistan, Pakistan acted as a facilitator for Washington while maintaining deep channels with the Taliban. The result was not a negotiated peace, but the Taliban’s return to power. Islamabad did not resolve the conflict; it managed the contradiction long enough to profit from it. The same method now appears to be visible in the Iran-U.S. track.
The only clear winner from the Islamabad Talks was Pakistan itself.
The negotiations ended in diplomatic stalemate, but Islamabad extracted value on multiple fronts. First, after years of hesitation, Pakistan finally allowed banks to operate with crypto service providers. At the centre of this shift is World Liberty Financial, a company in which the Trump family reportedly holds a major equity stake. Its stablecoin is expected to be used in large-scale Pakistani transactions. In January, Zach Witkoff, CEO of World Liberty, visited Islamabad and met Pakistan’s political and military leadership. Months later, his father, Steve Witkoff, participated in the Islamabad Talks. The talks failed diplomatically, but Pakistan’s crypto opening moved ahead.
Second, Pakistan reportedly sent planes and troops to Saudi Arabia to honour the “mutual defence pact” signed the previous September, receiving eight billion dollars in return. Third, and most consequentially, Islamabad opened six land corridors to Iran through Balochistan, activating a logistics network linking Gwadar, Quetta, Taftan and other strategic nodes. Iranian media claim that more than 3,000 containers are already in transit.
This last move is the most revealing. While presenting itself as a mediator between Washington and Tehran, Pakistan was simultaneously helping Iran weaken the central instrument of U.S. pressure: the naval blockade imposed by Donald Trump. Goods from third countries, especially Russia and China, can now reach Iran by land through Pakistani territory, reducing the effect of maritime restrictions in the Strait of Hormuz.
This is not a contradiction. It is Pakistan’s strategic method.
For decades, Islamabad has survived by turning duplicity into leverage. It offers cooperation to one side, reassurance to another, and deniability to all. It is an ally, interlocutor, spoiler and beneficiary at once. It takes money from Washington, builds infrastructure with Beijing, engages Moscow, negotiates with Tehran, manages Kabul, and measures every move against India. Its value lies precisely in the fact that it is indispensable and unreliable at the same time.
The April 25 ministerial order opening routes through Balochistan to the Iranian border crossings at Gabd and Taftan was therefore not an accidental breach. It was an official and deliberate act. Routes such as Gwadar-Gabd and Karachi-Taftan now allow containers stranded in Pakistani ports to move toward Iran by land. These routes are slower, costlier and more vulnerable than maritime supply lines, but they are sufficient to provide Tehran with a safety valve.
That safety valve matters. It does not fully defeat the blockade, but it softens it. It does not rescue Iran’s economy, but it prevents total strangulation. It allows Washington to maintain pressure while avoiding the consequences of complete Iranian collapse. In that sense, Pakistan may not be sabotaging U.S. policy entirely; it may be offering the kind of controlled leakage that makes maximum pressure politically sustainable.
This may explain Trump’s strikingly calm response. Asked about Pakistan’s decision, he reportedly said, “Yes, yes, I know everything… I have great respect for Pakistan, for Field Marshal Asim Munir, and for the prime minister.” No anger. No threat. No public warning. The message was obvious: Washington knows, and Washington is choosing to look away.
That choice reflects hard geography. Pakistan borders Iran, Afghanistan, China and India. It sits at the intersection of South Asia, Central Asia and the Middle East. There is no easy substitute. Pushing Islamabad completely away would mean handing it more fully to Beijing and, increasingly, Moscow. The old American logic remains intact: better a treacherous partner than an open adversary.
Yet the cost of that logic is high. Pakistan’s usefulness has repeatedly encouraged Washington to overlook the very behaviour that makes Islamabad dangerous. This was true in Afghanistan. It is now visible again in the Iran file.
The irony is glaring. A state that contributed, directly and indirectly, to the development of Iran’s nuclear capabilities through Abdul Qadeer Khan’s proliferation network now presents itself as a facilitator in negotiations over Iran’s nuclear programme. This is not merely political hypocrisy. It is a distortion of the very idea of mediation. A credible mediator should reduce distrust. Pakistan monetises it.
The problem becomes even starker when viewed alongside Islamabad’s record on jihadist militancy. Around the same period as the Islamabad Talks, the anniversary of the Pahalgam attack in Indian Kashmir returned attention to Pakistan’s continued links with violent non-state actors. That attack, which killed 26 civilians on religious grounds, remains a symbol of the overlap between jihadist militancy and elements of Pakistan’s state apparatus. As Islamabad presented itself as a global mediator, photographs circulated showing members of Pakistan’s political and military establishment in the company of figures associated with terrorist organisations, including actors linked to the planning of the Pahalgam attack.
This is where the mediation narrative collapses entirely. The issue is not simply that Pakistan is opportunistic. It is that Pakistan’s credibility is structurally compromised. A state that offers diplomatic good offices while maintaining ambiguous relationships with violent non-state actors is not a neutral broker. It is an actor operating on multiple levels at once, keeping open channels that would be considered incompatible in any serious mediation framework.
Mediation requires, if not neutrality, then at least consistency. Pakistan cannot afford consistency. Its entire strategic model depends on avoiding definitive choices.
Hamid Gul, the former ISI chief, once said that history would record that the ISI defeated the Soviet Union in Afghanistan with American help, and then defeated the United States in Afghanistan with American help. He was speaking of Afghanistan, but the sentence described more than one war. It described a method: use the contradictions of others to compensate for one’s own weaknesses.
That method is now being applied again. Pakistan presents itself as indispensable to Washington, useful to Tehran, open to Beijing, relevant to Riyadh and necessary to regional stability. But it does not resolve conflicts. It positions itself inside them. It turns every crisis into a bargaining chip.
Balochistan is central to this new phase. The land corridors to Iran run through a region marked by insurgency, repression, separatism, Chinese investment and local anger. Gwadar, Taftan, Gabd, Quetta and Panjgur are not neutral logistical points; they are nodes in a permanent crisis. More traffic through these routes may generate revenue and strategic relevance for Islamabad, but it also creates more targets. The more Pakistan uses Balochistan as leverage, the more Balochistan becomes a vulnerability.
This is especially important because the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor already makes Balochistan a strategic flashpoint. Gwadar is central to Beijing’s regional ambitions. Every new trade artery through the province deepens the overlap between Pakistani military interests, Chinese infrastructure, Iranian access and local insurgent resistance. Washington may treat the Balochistan corridors as a manageable loophole today, but over time such routes may strengthen alternative economic and strategic networks beyond U.S. control.
That is the danger of tolerating Pakistan’s duplicity. Each compromise looks manageable in isolation. Each exception appears tactically useful. But together, they gradually reshape the regional architecture. Corridors become habits. Habits become dependencies. Dependencies become leverage.
For Islamabad, this is the goal. Pakistan does not need to win decisively. It only needs to remain necessary. It does not impose order; it survives disorder. It does not resolve contradictions; it inhabits them. In a fragmented international system, that may be enough.
The Islamabad Talks failed not despite Pakistan’s contradictions, but because of them. The talks could not produce a substantive agreement because the mediator had no interest in a clean outcome. Clean outcomes reduce leverage. Ambiguity multiplies it.
Washington may believe it is managing Pakistan. Tehran may believe it is exploiting Pakistan. Beijing may believe it is absorbing Pakistan. Riyadh may believe it is buying Pakistan. But Pakistan’s military establishment has spent decades proving that it can be all things to all patrons, at least long enough to extract the next payment, concession or strategic opening.
This does not make Pakistan strong in a conventional sense. It remains economically fragile, politically unstable, internally divided and dependent on external support. But weakness can itself become a tool when combined with geography and duplicity. Pakistan’s constant instability makes it dangerous to abandon; its location makes it impossible to ignore; its networks make it useful; and its unreliability makes it costly to trust.
That is why the Islamabad Talks matter. They reveal not a diplomatic failure, but a system functioning exactly as designed. Pakistan hosted the theatre. It collected the benefits. It kept Iran breathing, Washington engaged, Saudi Arabia paying, China positioned and itself at the centre of the map.
The international system continues to reward this behaviour because it lacks better options and because great powers often prefer useful ambiguity to uncomfortable clarity. But the lesson of Afghanistan should have been obvious: when Pakistan is allowed to mediate conflicts in which it has deep, opaque and contradictory interests, the result is rarely peace. More often, it is managed failure — profitable for Islamabad, costly for everyone else.
In the end, Pakistan’s strategy is neither elegant nor stable. It is not the strategy of a confident power. It is the survival doctrine of a state that has learned to convert disorder into relevance. It does not need to defeat its partners. It only needs to ensure they can never fully dispense with it.
That is the real meaning of the Islamabad Talks. Pakistan did not bring Iran and the United States closer. It brought itself closer to the centre of the crisis. And in Islamabad’s strategic culture, that is victory enough.
eng.mizzima.com