The advantage of access: Why Pakistan has emerged as the mediator between Iran and the US

No one should be surprised that Pakistan has emerged as the intermediary between Iran and the United States, helped secure a two-week ceasefire at a moment of extreme danger and is now hosting peace talks in Islamabad.

To see this as an unexpected diplomatic leap is to ignore both Pakistan’s strategic location and its long, if uneven, history of backchannel diplomacy. Islamabad did not suddenly acquire relevance because this war became dangerous. It was already relevant because it has spent decades positioning itself at the intersection of rival power centres, often talking to states that do not trust one another but still need a messenger they can all use.

Pakistan’s current role is rooted first in geography. Iran is not a distant crisis for Pakistan. It is a neighbour with whom Pakistan shares a long border, overlapping ethnic population, security concerns, energy anxieties, and deep religious and social connections. A war that weakens or destabilises Iran does not remain confined to Iranian territory. It threatens to spill directly into Pakistan through sectarian tensions, refugee flows, fuel shocks, and militancy in Balochistan.

For Islamabad, mediation is therefore not some idealistic project dressed up as global leadership. It is a hard calculation of national interest. Preventing the collapse of order next door is simply too important for Pakistan to remain passive.

But many states have a stake in regional calm. What makes Pakistan different is that it can still talk to almost everyone involved. It has working ties with Washington and its army chief is close to the President Donald Trump. It has durable channels to Tehran. It has deep military and political relations with Saudi Arabia and other Gulf monarchies. It remains one of China’s closest partners.

It does not carry the same baggage in Iranian eyes as several Arab states aligned too openly with the United States nor does it look to Washington like a hostile ideological global power. That combination is rare. Pakistan has enough credibility with all sides to make itself useful when direct communication breaks down.

That is exactly what seems to have happened in this crisis. The significance of Pakistan’s role lies not in some romantic idea of neutral peacemaking. Pakistan is not neutral in the abstract sense and no serious country ever is. What it does possess is access. It can carry messages, test positions, reduce the political cost of contact, and provide a venue where talks can begin without either side appearing to surrender.

This is what negotiation often looks like in the real world. It is less about moral authority than about strategic usability.

Pakistan has played this kind of role before. The most famous case came in July 1971, when it helped facilitate US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger’s secret trip to Beijing. That mission opened the path to US President Richard Nixon’s historic visit to China in February 1972 and changed the architecture of the Cold War.

Pakistan was chosen because it was one of the very few states trusted by both Washington and Beijing. It could protect secrecy, carry messages, and manage a diplomatic manoeuvre whose consequences were far bigger than itself. That episode remains the clearest proof that Pakistan has long been capable of serving as a channel between adversaries when the stakes are high enough.

Its role in Afghanistan offers another example, though a more complicated one. During the negotiations surrounding the 1988 Geneva Accords that paved the way for the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan, Pakistan was not a detached bystander. It was a frontline state, a signatory, and an intermediary all at once. That dual role made its diplomacy controversial, but it also made it indispensable. Pakistan knew the actors, held influence over key networks, and could not be ignored in any serious effort to manage the conflict.

The same pattern returned in the post-2001 era. Pakistan hosted the first publicly acknowledged direct talks between the Afghan Taliban and the government in Kabul in Murree in 2015. Later, in the run up to the Doha process that culminated in the 2020 agreement between the United States and the Taliban, Pakistan again played a central role. It used its longstanding ties with the Taliban leadership, coordinated with Qatar, facilitated travel and access, and helped sustain channels that Washington could not build alone.

That mediation was deeply contested and often morally compromised, but it still demonstrated something important. Pakistan becomes valuable precisely in those conflicts where other powers need access to actors, they cannot easily reach themselves.

That history matters now. Iran does not have to love Pakistan to see its utility. The United States does not have to trust Pakistan completely to rely on its channels. Both sides only need to recognise that Islamabad can do something neither can do directly under current conditions. It can keep the conversation alive without forcing either party into premature public concessions.

Pakistan has also spent years trying to ease tensions between Saudi Arabia and Iran. These efforts did not produce the eventual breakthrough that China brokered in 2023, but they were far from meaningless. Pakistani leaders made repeated attempts at shuttle diplomacy in 2016 and 2019, hoping to keep open a line between Riyadh and Tehran at moments when regional tensions risked becoming unmanageable.

Even where Pakistan did not deliver a final settlement, it often helped preserve the possibility of one. That too is a form of diplomatic labour, even if it is less celebrated than signing ceremonies.

Another reason Pakistan was always a likely facilitator lies in its internal composition. It is not merely a Sunni Muslim state looking at Iran from the outside. It has 20 million-25 million Shia population, one of the largest Shia populations in the world. Any conflict involving Iran reverberates within Pakistan’s own social fabric.

This creates both vulnerability and understanding. Islamabad knows that a prolonged war with Iran can inflame sectarian passions at home, but it also knows that this internal diversity gives Pakistan a degree of social and political sensitivity that many other American partners lack. In a crisis shaped as much by identity and symbolism as by military calculations, that matters.

Then there is the military factor. Pakistan’s armed forces remain central to the country’s foreign policy, and that reality is often criticised. Yet in moments of high-risk diplomacy, it can also be an advantage. External actors want to know whether a mediator can deliver, whether its commitments will survive partisan change, and whether its security establishment is aligned with its civilian leadership.

In Pakistan’s case, both the prime minister and the military command have been visibly engaged in the negotiation effort. That gives Pakistan a kind of state coherence that outside powers take seriously, especially when the issue involves war, deterrence, and regional military escalation.

Pakistan’s emergence is also a reminder of how much diplomatic space India has surrendered. India once cultivated an image of nonalignment and bridge building. Today, its increasingly visible strategic alignment with the United States and its closeness to Israeli positions have narrowed its room for manoeuvre.

Pakistan, by contrast, has retained enough ambiguity to remain useful across rival camps. What is often dismissed as inconsistency in Pakistani foreign policy is, in moments like this, a source of flexibility.

None of this means Pakistan will produce a durable peace. The ceasefire could collapse. The talks in Islamabad may fail. The gaps between Tehran and Washington may remain too wide to bridge. But that is not the point.

The real point is that Pakistan’s role should not shock anyone who has paid attention to its diplomatic history. From the United States and China to Afghanistan, from Saudi Arabia and Iran to the present crisis, Pakistan has repeatedly inserted itself where rivals need contact but do not yet trust engagement. It has long specialised in opening doors that others cannot open themselves.

Ashok Swain is a professor of peace and conflict research at Uppsala University, Sweden.