Turan Research Center

The war between the United States, Israel, and Iran has become the most dangerous conflict in the Middle East this century. Now in its second month, it has also produced an unlikely diplomatic protagonist. Pakistan, a country rarely associated with Middle Eastern peacemaking, has positioned itself as the principal intermediary between Washington and Tehran, relaying demands, brokering confidence-building measures, and assembling a coalition of Sunni powers behind a ceasefire framework.

On March 31, Pakistan and China issued a five-point proposal for ending this escalating war. It called for an immediate ceasefire, peace talks, protection of civilians, the provision of humanitarian aid, reopening the Strait of Hormuz, and moving towards a comprehensive peace deal in accordance with the “purpose and principles of the United Nations charter and international law”. By joining Islamabad in presenting a roadmap to end the war, Beijing has subtly indicated that it might assume the role of a guarantor that Tehran seeks for a future agreement. The proposal capped a week of shuttle diplomacy in which Islamabad carried messages between the warring sides and convinced Tehran to allow some 20 oil tankers under its flag through Hormuz as a gesture of seriousness.

Pakistan’s centrality in this effort has surprised many observers. But Islamabad’s motivations are not altruistic. The war threatens to activate multiple fault lines that run through the Pakistani state: sectarian, economic, territorial, and strategic. Understanding why Pakistan assumed the role of mediator requires examining each of those vulnerabilities in turn.

Sectarian Fault Line

Pakistan is motivated by self-interest in seeking a peaceful end to a war in which it is not a party, but which threatens its core interests, stability, and even prospects of survival as a state. The foremost factor motivating its actions is its own Shia population. Pakistan has the largest Shia population after Iran. They constitute up to 20 percent of Pakistan’s estimated 250 million population. Islamabad endured violent protests by Shia protestors after the U.S. and Israel killed Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, at the beginning of the war.

At least 30 people were killed in violent protests across the country on March 1. In the most violent single incident, at least 10 people were killed, and scores more were injured in the southern seaport city of Karachi when U.S. Marines opened fire as a mob attempted to storm the U.S. consulate. In the predominantly Shia northern region of Gilgit-Baltistan, which borders China, at least 20 people were killed, and scores more were injured when mobs burned a UN office and damaged or torched several government buildings. Islamabad imposed a curfew in Gilgit-Baltistan and cracked down hard on the protestors. Islamabad is currently pushing for trying some of the protestors in military courts for allegedly vandalizing military installations during the protests.

By cracking down hard on Shia protestors, Pakistan signaled it would not risk its Shia population mobilizing to participate in the war or protest in opposition to it. The country’s most powerful official, Chief of Defense Forces Field Marshall Asim Munir, met a group of Shia clerics on March 19. “Violence in Pakistan, on the basis of incidents occurring in another country, will not be tolerated,” he told the group, according to a handout by the Pakistani military’s media wing.

But some Shia clerics who participated in the meeting said they felt threatened and humiliated. One participant said that Munir’s comments gave the impression that the country’s dominant military establishment doesn’t trust the loyalty of Shia citizens. “We were told not to be more loyal to Iran. If we were more loyal to Iran, then we should leave Pakistan,” said Allama Syed Hasnain Abbas Gardezi, a Shia cleric in Islamabad who participated in the event.

Like Shia populations across the Middle East, Iran’s Islamic revolution inspired and mobilized Pakistan’s Shias, who are present across the country’s ethnic, class, and geographic fabric. Islamabad’s Islamization drive and its status as a harbinger of Western-funded anti-Soviet Afghan Jihad turned the country into a sectarian frontline between the Sunni and the Shia.

While Saudi Arabia funded anti-Shia Sunni political parties and their militant outfits, Iran also funded hardline Shia parties and their militant wings. During the past four decades, thousands have been killed and injured in the sectarian violence, with Shias making up most of the victims. Since at least 2013, Iran’s Islamic Revolution Guard Corps has mobilized Pakistani Shias to fight on its behalf in Syria. Thousands of members of the Zainabyoun Brigade, as the Pakistani Shia militia is formally known, have fought in Syria, which raises the possibility that they can be mobilized again to defend the Islamic Republic while it faces an existential crisis during the ongoing war.

Saudi And Gulf Connections

Closely tied to Islamabad’s complex relations with Iran’s Islamic Republic, led by Shia clerics, is Islamabad’s alliance with its archrival, Sunni Saudi Arabia. In September, Islamabad and Riyadh signed a Strategic Mutual Defense Agreement, which requires Pakistan to defend Saudi Arabia if it faces “aggression”. Yet Islamabad now wants to avoid joining the war against Tehran if Riyadh decides to retaliate against persistent Iranian attacks.

Pakistan, however, is hardly eager to join a devastating war against a Muslim neighbor with which it has enjoyed cordial, though occasionally tense, relations. For Pakistan’s powerful military leaders, joining a war, highly unpopular among its people, might prove to be a disaster. In addition, Islamabad's military posture is primarily oriented against archenemy India. Most of its air force, land forces, and navy are deployed along its eastern border with India and in the Indian Ocean. Pakistan is also currently engaged in a simmering war against its western neighbor, Afghanistan.

Islamabad has joined Riyadh, Ankara, and Cairo in a nascent Muslim bloc, which is closely watching the Israel-led effort to remake the Middle East. Unlike the United Arab Emirates, which has normalized relations with Israel under the Abrahamic Accords, these states are anxious about dealing with a possible regional hegemon if Israel succeeds in causing the demise of the Islamic Republic of Iran or severely weakens its military capabilities and regional standing. Before the war, Riyadh had already moved against curtailing Abu Dhabi’s influence. Some in Israel already see Turkey as the next Iran, while Ankara has urged the Gulf nations to weigh the risks of Israel emerging stronger from the conflict. Islamabad has not recognized Israel, but its policymakers are wary of dealing with its growing influence if it defeats Iran. For decades, they have felt threatened by New Delhi’s growing strategic ties with Israel. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s visit to Israel on the eve of its war with Iran and talk of forging a close strategic partnership raised alarm bells in Islamabad and must have raised questions in Tehran.

The economic impact of the Iran war appears to be a more immediate concern for Islamabad. Fuel prices have already doubled since the outbreak of the war. This is expected to unleash a new wave of inflation in the country, where persistent price increases are the top public issue. A prolonged war in the Gulf region could become an economic calamity for cash-strapped Islamabad. Some four million Pakistani workers, nearly half of them in Saudi Arabia, send home over $20 billion annually in remittances from the oil-rich Sunni Arab Gulf monarchies. The loss of these and trade with the Gulf would constitute an economic shock Pakistan can hardly absorb.

Balochistan

Pakistan and Iran share the vast restive region of Balochistan across their 560-mile-long border. The mineral and natural-resource-rich region, with its over 1,000-mile-long Makran coast along some of the busiest sea lanes, is divided into the poorest provinces in both countries. Since the dawn of this century, Pakistan’s southwestern Balochistan Province has been reeling from a festering separatist insurgency by secular ethnic Baloch ethnonationalists. Thousands have been killed and hundreds of thousands displaced by military operations and militant attacks. Hundreds of separatists, soldiers, and civilians were killed in the largest ever coordinated attacks earlier this year. The attacks proved that Islamabad’s relentless crackdown on the Baloch nationalist has not crushed their insurrection in the absence of a political settlement.

Iran’s southeastern province of Sistan-Baluchestan has been historically marginalized. The region's Baloch minority, who are two percent of the over 90 million population, has faced discrimination because of its status as an ethnic and linguistic minority where Persians are the majority. As Sunnis, the Baloch are also a religious minority in a predominantly Shia nation ruled by clerics of the same sect. Since 2004, successive Islamist militant groups such as Jundullah and Jaish al-Adl have attacked Iranian forces and government interests in the region.

Tehran and Islamabad have frequently accused and even attacked each other’s territories over support for Baloch rebels. Tehran has also accused Saudi Arabia, the United States, and Israel of support for Baloch militants. Islamabad accuses New Delhi of supporting the Baloch separatists. New Delhi, Riyadh, Washington, and Israel have rejected Islamabad and Tehran’s claims. Since 2024, Tehran and Islamabad have attempted some consistent cooperation against militants in their respective parts of Balochistan. Their cooperation followed tit-for-tat strikes in early 2024 in which Iran and Pakistan targeted Baloch separatists in the other country. Both accused the other of harboring Baloch separatists.

At the beginning of the current war, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called on the Baloch, Persians, Kurds, and Azeris “to join forces, topple the regime, and secure” their future. Tehran has viewed such statements and attempts to mobilize armed Kurdish separatists as a plan to fragment Iran along ethnic lines. To prevent such an outcome, Tehran has attacked Iranian Kurdish separatists in northern Iraq. Islamabad would like to avoid dealing with Iran’s fragmentation at all costs because of the perceived danger it would pose to its own cohesion. Thus, diplomacy remains a natural low-cost alternative to all the options currently available to its leaders.

The Limits of Mediation

Pakistan's diplomatic intervention is driven less by ambition than by necessity. Every dimension of the Iran war, including sectarian mobilization, Gulf economic dependence, further instability in Balochistan and the risk of Iranian fragmentation, feeds directly into Islamabad's most acute domestic vulnerabilities. Mediation is the lowest-cost instrument available to a state that cannot afford to be drawn into the conflict or to ignore it.

Whether Pakistan can sustain this role is another question. Islamabad has limited leverage over either Washington or Tehran, and its credibility as a neutral broker is complicated by its defense pact with Riyadh and its own crackdown on Shia dissent. The Chinese co-sponsorship lends weight to the ceasefire framework, but Beijing has so far avoided committing the kind of diplomatic capital. It is not clear whether Beijing will offer security guarantees, economic incentives, and enforcement mechanisms required to make a future settlement durable.

For now, Pakistan has succeeded in opening a channel where none existed. Translating that channel into a ceasefire, and a ceasefire into a negotiated settlement, will require far more than message-carrying. It will require the warring parties to see a political off-ramp as preferable to escalation. For now, neither Washington nor Tehran appears ready to make such a calculation.

Abubakar Siddique is a journalist, author, and researcher specializing in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and the broader geopolitical landscape of South and Central Asia and the Middle East. He is known for his rigorous reporting and analysis on conflict, militancy, diplomacy, regional rivalries, and society. His expertise is reflected in his 2014 book, The Pashtun Question: The Unresolved Key to the Future of Pakistan and Afghanistan.

For the first time in their tumultuous and fraught relations spanning nearly eight decades, Pakistan and Afghanistan are locked in a simmering war. The two predominantly Sunni Muslim neighbors are stuck in a political and military stalemate. Both are unlikely to de-escalate or score an outright military victory. The United States and Israel’s war with neighboring Iran occupies international attention, and the Middle Eastern Muslim nations potentially interested in mediation between Kabul and Islamabad. This has further pushed both sides to appear to have given up on diplomacy and instead are settling scores on the battlefield.

Escalating Fighting

Following deadly attacks on security forces in the northwestern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Province in late February, Pakistan’s Defense Minister Khwaja Asif declared an “open war” against the Afghan Taliban government because Islamabad’s “patience has reached its limit.” Since then, Pakistani military jets have targeted alleged hideouts of the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), also known as the Pakistani Taliban and the Taliban government’s purported installations across Afghanistan.

Under Operation Ghazab Lil-haq (Arabic for Wrath for Righteousness), Pakistan’s much larger and modern military has employed conventional tactics such as airstrikes, artillery barrages, and infantry maneuvers to pressure the Taliban government. Islamabad claimed to have killed more than 650 Taliban soldiers and destroyed hundreds of Taliban posts, command centers, ammunition depots, military vehicles, and installations.

Pakistan’s hardline approach to the Afghan Taliban comes from the country’s most powerful man, Field Marshal Asim Munir. The 56-year-old mercurial general heads the powerful military and is the de facto ruler of the country, which military dictators have governed for most of its history. According to politicians and officials in Islamabad, mounting pressure from the elite officer corps of the army prompted Munir to pressure the Taliban through military strikes. Last year, relentless attacks by the TTP led to the rising casualty rates among the security forces, including the officers leading troops in the field. Army officers are the constituency central to Munir’s power and the army’s institutional dominance. “Peace could only prevail between both sides if the Afghan Taliban renounced their support for terrorism and terrorist organizations,” Munir told soldiers and officers on March 4.

In retaliation, the Taliban has employed asymmetric warfare. Under Operation Rad Al-Zulum (Arabic for Rejection of Cruelty), its forces claim to have engaged and overrun Pakistani border posts in surprise attacks. Kabul has even attempted to target military installations deep inside Pakistan with suicide drones. “If Kabul is attacked, Islamabad too will be attacked,” said Mawlawi Mohammad Yaqub Mujahid, the Taliban Defense Minister and son of the Islamist movement’s founder, Mullah Mohammad Omar. In the same interview, the Taliban leader said that they are ready to fight against Pakistan for a decade.

The TTP and some smaller Pakistani Taliban factions have also announced an increase in their attacks on Pakistani security forces. There has been a visible uptick in the attacks in the restive districts of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, where civilians sustained casualties in attacks claimed by the Pakistani Taliban. The mountainous region forms nearly half of Pakistan’s more than 2,500 kilometers (1600 miles) long border with Afghanistan. TTP’s revival has harmed civilians caught between its push for overwhelming the government’s authority and the military’s strong-arm tactics to suppress its expanding insurgency. The TTP has partly financed its insurgency through extortion. Surrendered Taliban, small factions of pro-state militants who are often TTP turncoats, have enjoyed impunity and traumatized locals for decades.

Civilian Suffering

Overall, civilians, most of them members of various Pashtun tribes that straddle the 19th-century Durand Line, as the contested border between the two neighbors is known, are paying a heavy price for the war. Some Pakistani airstrikes have killed unarmed civilians.

According to the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA), a Pakistani airstrike on March 16 reportedly killed and injured dozens of patients seeking treatment for drug addiction in Omid Addiction Treatment Hospital.  While the Taliban authorities claimed that the airstrike killed more than 400 people, a BBC corresponded in Kabul said at least 100 people were killed based on hospital records and healthcare staff in the Afghan capital. Pakistan claimed it had targeted the Taliban’s military infrastructure. But the airstrike was condemned or questioned by internationally. Before this airstrike UNAMA said at least 75 civilians were killed, and 193 were injured in Afghanistan since the outbreak of the hostilities. It said most of the victims were women and children who “continue to pay the price for the latest escalation in cross-border violence.”

In the eastern Afghan province of Nangarhar, at least 17 members of a single family were killed in an airstrike on February 22. On March 15, a mortar shell allegedly fired from Afghanistan killed four brothers in Bajaur, a northern district in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.

According to the Norwegian Refugee Committee, an aid group, since late February, fighting has displaced more than 115,000 people in eastern Afghanistan since late February. In Pakistan, too, some border communities are affected by the cross-border shelling. In harsh campaigns since October 2023, Pakistan and Iran have pushed back over 5.4 million Afghan refugees and migrants back into their country. “The speed and scale of these returns have pushed Afghanistan deeper into crisis,” said UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency. Casualties and displacement are likely to mount as the fighting goes on.

Since October, the complete closure of all the border crossings between Afghanistan and Pakistan has devastated the fragile economy of their borderlands. While landlocked Afghanistan has historically relied on Pakistan’s southern seaport of Karachi for imports, Islamabad is now paying a heavy toll for cutting trade ties with Kabul. It has lost a sizeable market of about 40 million people in the neighboring country for its agricultural, food, pharmaceutical, and consumer industries. As the dominant partner in the estimated $3 billion annual bilateral trade, Pakistan is set to lose a significant chunk of its international trade and export earnings.

Why Allies Turned Into Enemies

Pakistan was the first foreign power to ally with the Afghan Taliban after its emergence in the southern Afghan province of Kandahar in late 1994. It recognized the Taliban government after its ragtag forces overran Kabul with considerable Pakistani covert support in September 1996. Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates soon followed. Islamabad became the principal foreign backer of the Taliban’s internationally isolated pariah government. Accounts from a quarter century ago have extensively documented the Pakistani military’s controlling influence over one of the world’s most enigmatic jihadist organizations.

But their alliance, based on their own exigencies, developed deep fissures after the 9/11 2001 attacks in New York and Washington. Taliban leaders turned deeply resentful of Islamabad’s alliance with the United States. They blamed it for facilitating the US-led toppling of their government in late 2001. Yet the persecution of Taliban leaders and their exclusion from the new political system in Afghanistan helped Islamabad to maintain its alliance with the Taliban alive by sheltering its leaders and foot soldiers. As part of its covert policy of double-dealing, Islamabad reaped the benefits of becoming a front-line ally of Washington. Yet at the same time, it helped the Taliban challenge, undermine, and eventually topple the Western-backed Afghan government and the US-led Global War on Terrorism in Afghanistan.

As they ran a deadly insurgency from safe havens in Pakistan across Afghanistan, Islamabad’s tactics gave the Taliban rank and file strong reasons to develop suspicion or even outright hostility towards it. Several key Taliban leaders, including Mullah Akhtar Mohammad Mansur, the successor to Mullah Mohammad Omar, were either killed in Pakistan or captured, handed over to the US, or incarcerated for years. This suspicion may have prompted the Taliban to insist on opening its political office to Qatar in 2013, away from Pakistani control.

In Doha, the Taliban negotiated a withdrawal agreement with Washington in February 2020, which paved the way for its triumphant return to power in Afghanistan in August 2021. By then, Islamabad, however, had no real leverage over the Islamist movement, which had transformed into a sophisticated political and military organization during the nearly two decades of insurgency. Still, some Pakistani officials, politicians, and public figures celebrated the Taliban’s return to power as a major geopolitical victory. Former Prime Minister Imran Khan praised the Taliban’s return to Kabul as breaking “the chains of slavery”.

Pakistan’s security tzars, however, knew the reality of their wanning influence and rushed to Kabul to win the Taliban’s support for a settlement with the TTP. Thousands of the group’s fighters had fought for the Taliban, shared the same ideology, and had even pledged allegiance to its leaders. During two decades of the Taliban insurgency, the TTP leaders and fighters had developed camaraderie with the Afghan Taliban. While Pakistani generals basked in the illusion that they still had some lingering influence over the Taliban, the Islamist group systematically paved the way to exploit Islamabad’s vulnerabilities.

The TTP successfully manipulated Islamabad’s keenness on reconciling the group through talks brokered by the Taliban government. While it agreed to engage in a ceasefire, its fighters returned to Khyber Pakhtunkhwa in force. They brought back a blueprint of the Taliban’s successful insurgency against the US-led military occupation in Afghanistan. Instead of returning to terrorist tactics targeting civilians, they raised substantial resources through extortion. They focused their kinetic effort on targeting Pakistani security forces. The TTP also benefited from the stockpiles of arms left behind by the US military and the Afghan forces it had propped up. While the Taliban leaders consistently told their Pakistani counterparts to resolve the TTP as an internal security issue, a sizeable number of Afghans joined the TTP’s fighting formations. This signaled to Islamabad that its erstwhile Afghan allies have now turned into its deadly enemies.

This resulted in each subsequent year after 2021 becoming more deadly for Pakistani forces in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. Rising violence in the province magnified the impact of a two-decade-old separatist insurgency in the southwestern Balochistan Province, where a secular ethnonationalist Baloch separatist insurgency has persisted despite a quarter-century of Islamabad's heavy-handed crackdown. Last year was the deadliest in a decade. Security forces members comprised over 40 percent of the more than 1,000 terrorism related fatalities.

Winners And Losers

Islamabad appears keen on pressing its advantage over the Taliban in conventional warfare. Yet, its airstrikes in southern and eastern Afghanistan have failed to either pressure the Taliban to give up support for the TTP or substantially weaken the Taliban's stranglehold over power in Afghanistan. It is not clear whether Islamabad has the political will or financial muscle to launch a prolonged military campaign aimed at forcing the Taliban to comply with its demands or even cause a collapse of its four-year-old rule.

Islamabad’s outreach to anti-Taliban Afghan factions and personalities has not gathered enough momentum to pose a meaningful political threat to the Taliban rule. There is no visible Western or regional appetite for a civil war among Afghans to weaken or replace the Taliban rule. Recent visits by Pakistani Islamist and jihadist leaders have not delivered any visible breakthrough in easing the tensions between Islamabad and Kabul.

The Taliban, however, has gained much from standing up to its erstwhile ally, Pakistan’s powerful military. It has united factions within the Taliban who were increasingly at odds over hardline polices such as the draconian ban on women’s education, social restrictions, and other governance issues. The Taliban has now successfully positioned itself as an enemy of Islamabad. This has won it popular support from many Afghans, both inside the country and among the global Afghan diaspora, who harbor strong grievances against Islamabad either because of how they were treated when they lived there or over its destructive policies during the various phases of war in the country.

For some Afghans, this has changed the Taliban’s status as nothing more than Pakistan’s proxies. This has also positioned the Taliban to champion Afghan nationalism and its irredentist claims over parts of Pakistan. In the words of Afghan political analyst Mushtaq Rahim, “Confronting Pakistan has proved a major political boon for the Taliban; it will only entrench their power in Afghanistan.” The Taliban’s deep ideological ingress, personal ties, and understanding of the Pakistani state and society make them a more formidable adversary for Islamabad compared to secular pro-Western governments preceding their return to power in the twenty-first century or even the royalist, communist, and Islamist Afghan governments during the twentieth century.

In a major reversal of Islamabad’s fortunes in Afghanistan, its confrontation with the Taliban has pushed the Islamist group into an alliance with Pakistan's archenemy India. "It is another attempt by Pakistan to externalize its internal failures,” said Randhir Jaiswal, a spokesman for India’s External Affairs Ministry, after Pakistani airstrikes in eastern Afghanistan on February 22. “India reiterates its support for Afghanistan's sovereignty, territorial integrity, and independence." For decades, New Delhi has accused Islamabad of using Islamist militants as an instrument of irregular warfare against its much larger forces. Kabul’s continuing hostilities now might enable New Delhi to undermine Islamabad through a covert military alliance with the Taliban.

Pakistan’s long-time strategic ally against India, China, is set to lose the most because of its war with Afghanistan. Beijing has viewed the Taliban’s return to power as an opportunity to protect its borders from Islamist militants, boost its regional influence, and carve out a stake in exploiting Afghanistan's vast mineral resources and trade potential. But the war between the two neighbors has undermined and even threatened Chinese interests.

In a sign that Beijing has not given up on reconciling Kabul and Islamabad, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi called his Afghan counterpart, Mawlawi Amir Khan Muttaqi, on March 13 to urge a quick ceasefire and dialogue. “Afghanistan and Pakistan are inseparable brothers and neighbors that cannot be moved away from each other,” a statement by the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs quoted Wang Yi as saying. “Issues between the two countries can only be resolved through dialogue.”

But it is not clear whether Beijing is willing to invest some real diplomatic capital in engaging its two neighbors in a dialogue to resolve their bilateral issues. In the absence of such arbitration, Islamabad and Kabul are likely to remain entangled in an unwinnable war.

Abubakar Siddique is a journalist, author, and researcher specializing in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and the broader geopolitical landscape of South and Central Asia and the Middle East. He is known for his rigorous reporting and analysis on conflict, militancy, diplomacy, regional rivalries, and society. His expertise is reflected in his 2014 book, The Pashtun Question: The Unresolved Key to the Future of Pakistan and Afghanistan.