The Plague Doctor of Islamabad

• By Meer Yassir Ahmed
• Comments 0
• 01 Apr 2026

Pakistan Offers to Heal a War It Helped Make Possible. Tehran Is Not Fooled. The World Should Not Be Either

There is a particular kind of audacity that only history can produce. In July 1971, a Pakistani government plane lifted secretly from an Islamabad airfield carrying Henry Kissinger and four aides toward Beijing. The trip was covert, the facilitator was Pakistan, and the geopolitical consequences rewired the Cold War.  More than five decades later, Foreign Minister Ishaq Dar stood before cameras in Islamabad to announce that Pakistan would once again carry messages between great adversaries, this time between Washington and Tehran, in the middle of a war that has already killed more than three thousand people and closed the world's most critical energy waterway. Pakistan brokered the secret US-China backchannel in 1971, was a key interlocutor in the Geneva Accords that helped end the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s and facilitated the Doha Agreement that brought American troops home. Now it is relaying a US 15-point ceasefire proposal to Tehran, with Turkey and Egypt providing additional diplomatic support. Pakistan presents this as statesmanship. Iran's parliament speaker, Mohammad Bagher Qalibaf, called it a cover. Both assessments contain truth. Understanding which one contains more requires not a press conference; it requires history. The Architecture of Pakistan's Double Game For decades, Pakistan successfully preserved a balanced relationship with its deep rivals Iran and Saudi Arabia. For twenty years, it facilitated US military operations in Afghanistan while also keeping faith with its client Afghan insurgents. It resisted, without seeming to outright reject, the idea that its nuclear programme should be treated as an Islamic one. As US-China relations became more contentious, Islamabad demonstrated its diplomatic skills in avoiding having to choose sides. This is Pakistan's gift, and it is also Pakistan's original sin. The art of never fully choosing has, across seventy-eight years, made Pakistan indispensable to multiple powers simultaneously. It has also made Pakistan fundamentally untrustworthy to each of them in moments of genuine crisis. Tehran knows this history with the intimacy of a neighbour who has been robbed before. Historically, Iran was the first country to recognise Pakistan in 1947 and supported it in the 1965 and 1971 wars with India, building enduring political and cultural ties. That loyalty was Pakistan's inheritance. What it did with that inheritance is the story Iran's parliament speaker was referencing when he dismissed the Islamabad talks. Before the Islamic Revolution of 1979, there existed an atmosphere of genuine trust between the two countries. That equation radically changed after 1979. Pakistan supported the Taliban in Afghanistan; Iran opposed the Taliban.  In 1998, Taliban forces captured Mazar-e-Sharif and executed eleven Iranian diplomats, thirty-five Iranian truck drivers, and an Iranian journalist. Iran massed over 300,000 troops on the Afghan border. The country that stood with the Taliban, the country that placed Sunni strategic interests above the blood of Iranian diplomats, was Pakistan. That is not ancient

history. It is the foundational memory of Iran's security establishment. And it is the memory that makes Tehran's current ambivalence about Islamabad's mediation not paranoia, but pattern recognition. Why Iran Is Right to Be Suspicious Richard Haass, in A World in Disarray, argues that the post-Cold War international order failed because nations consistently prioritised short-term transactional advantage over long-term institutional reliability. Pakistan is, in many ways, the textbook example of his thesis, a state whose transactional brilliance has repeatedly undermined the very credibility that makes it valuable. Pakistan's position in the current crisis is made more precarious by internal vulnerabilities, the rise of terrorism after the Taliban's recapture of Afghanistan, sectarian sensitivities, economic strain, and political instability. Analysts noted the risk that instability in Iran could create ungoverned spaces along the Pakistan-Iran border, fuelling militant movements and reigniting separatist ambitions in Balochistan, where a separatist insurgency is already simmering. Pakistan shares a 905-kilometre border with Iran across Balochistan, one of the most porous and volatile frontier zones in Asia. Both countries have accused each other for years of harbouring each other's separatists. Iran accuses Pakistan of sheltering Iranian Sunni militant groups.  Pakistan accuses Iran of providing refuge to Baloch Liberation Army operatives. Pakistan also maintains close engagement with Saudi Arabia, which Tehran regards as the primary external patron of its regional enemies. Iran has consistently warned against it. Into this entangled web of competing loyalties, Pakistan now presents itself as an honest broker. Iran's response dismissal, punctuated by continued threats against US and Israeli commanders, is the institutional memory of a state that has watched Pakistan play both sides across five decades and learned not to mistake performance for principle. What Washington Wants and What It Costs Pakistan Domestically The latest warming of relations between the United States and Pakistan may require a fuller explanation than can be understood in transactional terms. Washington may be grooming Pakistan to once again assume the close regional security partner role it played in the Cold War, the defeat of the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, and the post-2001 counterinsurgency campaign. "The concern is that there are no free lunches in Washington," said a Pakistani security official. "We've seen this before, becoming a frontline state against the Soviets in 1979, and again post-9/11. Each time, the cost to internal security and national cohesion was enormous." The cost this time is already visible. A day after the United States and Israel attacked Iran and killed Supreme Leader Khamenei, clashes erupted in Karachi and across northern Pakistan. At least twenty-two people died, and over 120 were injured nationwide. Pakistani Shiite Muslims clashed with security forces in several cities. At least twelve people were killed in and around the US Consulate in Karachi after a mob breached the compound. Pakistan is a country where twenty percent of the

population is Shia Muslim, where the killing of Iranian leaders is not a foreign policy abstraction but a communal wound. Ishaq Dar's announcement that Pakistan is "very happy" to facilitate talks between Washington and Tehran is, domestically, a sentence carrying explosive potential. The Strait, the Ships, and the Stakes Henry Kissinger, in World Order, perhaps the most consequential book on statecraft written in the post-Cold War era, argued that the central challenge of international relations is the construction of a shared conception of legitimacy without which no order, however powerful, can endure.  The United States and Iran are two nations that have refused to share a conception of legitimacy since 1979. Every negotiation between them, the JCPOA, the Oman backchannels, the Vienna talks, has foundered on this foundational incompatibility. Pakistan is not offering a solution to that incompatibility. It is offering a room. Army Chief Field Marshal Asim Munir held at least one direct call with President Trump. Both Prime Minister Sharif and Munir also travelled to Saudi Arabia, with whom Pakistan signed a mutual defence agreement in September, and which hosts a US base.  These are the movements of a state operating at maximum diplomatic bandwidth, threading the needle between a superpower ally, a neighbouring adversary, a domestic population inflamed by sectarian grief, and a regional audience watching to see which way the Islamic world's only nuclear state breaks. Islamabad's backing was clearly measured. Ignoring domestic pressure to provide Iran with security assistance, it limited its response to rhetorical and symbolic support. In truth, while in recent years there has been a relaxation in bilateral relations between Iran and several of its neighbours, presumably no state in the region welcomes the prospect of a nuclear-armed Iran. This is the gap Iran's parliament speaker can read. Pakistan says, "We stand with Iran." Pakistan also signed a mutual defence pact with Saudi Arabia and arranged calls between its army chief and Donald Trump. These facts coexist. They are not contradictions in Pakistani foreign policy; they are its operating system. The Honest Verdict Iran has eased restrictions on commercial shipping in the Strait, agreeing late Saturday to allow twenty more Pakistani-flagged vessels to pass through, a clear signal that Iran remains open for business with the world, provided the United States abandons coercion. That gesture is not trust. It is leverage management, Tehran telling Islamabad that cooperation is transactional, contingent, and reversible. Pakistan's mediation may still produce something. The Kissinger flight to Beijing produced the most consequential diplomatic opening of the twentieth century. History does not disqualify the messenger simply because the messenger is compromised. But history also teaches that when the plague doctor arrives at your door, you check his hands before you open it. Iran is checking. The world should be watching.   (The Author is the executive editor of Rising Kashmir)