Recently Pakistan has stepped in to get the warring parties to negotiate a peace deal or should I say Pakistan has been set up by the US into this new avatar! On the face of it, it gives the US an escape route to exit the conflict which it got into without an exit plan in place and two there is also enough circumstantial evidence that Pakistan’s PM was asked to put out a post on X, which was in all probability drafted in the White House! By circumstantial evidence I mean Pakistan PM’s original post on X came with a header that said, “draft for Pakistan PM” and he amended it to remove that and let the rest of the post remain unchanged. Clearly, a Pakistan administration employee won’t call the drafted post as one with a heading “for Pakistan PM” — if a bureaucrat in India were to draft anything for PM Modi, then, they’d call it, “draft for PM” or “draft for Prime Minister Modi” and not “draft for Indian PM” — this clearly shows that the post was drafted outside of Pakistan and going by the recent bonhomie between the US and Pakistan, and the known fact that Pakistan has been subservient to the US throughout its history as a nation, this isn’t much of a leap of faith from there. The question isn’t is if Pakistan is doing this, rather it is why Pakistan is doing this and more importantly why the US is playing along nicely because just before India launched Op Sindoor after the Pahalgam terrorist attacks a little over a year ago, the US was all for India decimating Pakistan!
So, let’s start with why Pakistan has gotten into this role of an uninvited mediator and pacemaker? For this, we need to understand the situation Pakistan was/ is in before it started out with this role. In the last few years, Pakistan has come increasingly close to becoming a failed state with its economy and finances in shambles and its internal polity is turmoil with the previous PM Imran Khan incarcerated and his supporters sporadically fighting the streets with the forces of current PM Sharif as well as the army — it is a well known fact that it is the army that decides who is the “democratically” elected government in Pakistan. Apart from economy and polity in shambles, Pakistan faces freedom movement of the Baluchis who have been in an armed struggle with the Pakistan state since its formation and off late it appears that the Baluchis are winning and so is the case of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa with a major resistance group, the TTP originating from there and they too are against the Pakistan state for its closeness with the US — all these are challenges that Pakistan is facing on the internal front. On the external front, Afghanistan and Pakistan have been having a troubled relationship with scores of skirmishes on the Durand line. And then, the Pahalgam terrorist attacks were perpetrated by Pakistan in April of 2025 and what followed was establishment of India’s doctrine against cross-border terrorism and that was to pursue and destroy terrorist infrastructure anywhere it existed resulting in Operation Sindoor in May 2025 during which India destroyed Pakistan’s carefully built and curated terrorist infrastructure across that country and that led to Pakistan escalating and attacking India’s military assets as well as civilian areas which led to India’s retaliation and destruction of scores of Pakistani air bases as well as military installations and aircrafts — within three days of conflict, Pakistan sought ceasefire from India and India agreed to a cessation of operations, a pause in the ops, not a stop of the Operation Sindoor. Post Pahalgam terrorist attacks, India has also put the Indus river treaty in abeyance and since then re-started the dam projects on the rivers that were letting the waters flow to Pakistan unchecked — India stated that water and blood can’t flow together in response to Pakistan’s state sponsored cross-border terrorism in India. This is the background to where we find ourselves today when Pakistan has suddenly found favor of the US and is so-called playing a “peacemaker” in the US-Iran conflict!
Some questions that I started with and still remain unanswered are: (1) how come the US who had stated clearly that India can take action against Pakistan for the Pahalgam attacks changed its stance to become pro-Pakistan? And, (2) how come Pakistan has now assumed this new role as a “mediator peacemaker”? Let us delve a bit deeper to understand what’s happening behind the scenes in this geopolitical soap opera!
Firstly, the first question — what led to the change in the US stand on Pakistan post Pahalgam to post Op Sindoor? During Op Sindoor, following Pakistan’s escalatory attacks on India, India hit at one of the sites in Kirana hills near Mushaf/ Sargodha air base. Kirana hills is one of the sites where Pakistan stores its nuclear arsenal — it is also believed that the US also stores some of its n-arsenal at the Kirana hills and because of this strike by India on this site, the US DS forced the hand of Trump administration to change its stand on Pakistan and started pushing for an alignment with the Pakistan state to the point that Trump himself has since kept parroting that he stopped the war between India and Pakistan and amusingly that he should get the Nobel Peace Prize for it apart from stopping so many other wars across the world! The India-US ties took a nosedive since these utterances of Trump (along with the arbitrary tariffs imposed by the US on frivolous grounds) as they were contrary to what India’s stand has been all along that it was Pakistan who asked for a ceasefire and India had thus paused Ops Sindoor — do note that India has since consistently maintained that it has paused Ops Sindoor and not stopped it and that Ops Sindoor part 2 can start anytime soon. This stand of India has kept Pakistan on tenterhooks since and its chief Asim Munir who has been granted the title of Field Marshal, unashamedly for getting a solid drubbing at the hands of Indian armed forces during Ops Sindoor! Interestingly, there has been another deal that has happened between the Pakistan state and the Trump family is on crypto currency wherein a Trump family owned entity, World Liberty Financial (WLF) joined hands with a Pakistan government entity, curiously this deal was signed just before the Pahalgam terrorist attacks in India — so, Trump family interests were aligned with Pakistan even before these attacks took place — was this just a coincidence or a planned tactic by the Pakistan state to influence alignment of the US with its own interests, post the attacks? This can be answered by the fact that there was no valid reason for this deal to take place between WLF and Pak-government as was brought to light by Pakistan media itself and thus, it does appear that Pakistan state was wanting to influence an alignment with the US post the Pahalgam attacks. Lastly, since its independence, Pakistan has been aligned with the US and many times over, it has been bailed out by the US both financially and militarily and its fair to assume that the US DS has deep interests in Pakistan’s survival as a nation (as its vassal state) as from there the US can exert its influence in the region as it has consistently done in the past — from getting rid of erstwhile USSR from Afghanistan, to keep India busy by arming Pakistan and supporting it during all the Indo-Pak wars, to have a vantage point to exert influence over Iran, to name a few.
With this background, let us now come to the second question ie. how come Pakistan has now assumed this new role as a “mediator peacemaker” in the US-Iran conflict? Well, it’s been an engineered move by both the US DS and Pakistan military. The fact remains, that the only reason Pakistan can even play such a role of a “mediator peacemaker” between the warring entities is that it is a neighbour of Iran, nothing else! Iran and Pakistan are adversaries on many fronts, not to mention that Iran is predominantly a Shia state whereas Pakistan is Sunni dominated, and a state that has a history of atrocities against the Shia minority in Pakistan. This is further evident from the fact that Iran has been cagey about Pakistan in such a role as it doesn’t trust the Pakistan state and it knows the US-tilt that the Pakistan state has — and as evidenced by the fact that this role hasn’t delivered any result so far! But Pakistan’s role as a “mediator peacemaker” continues to make headlines across all of world media and has been touted across as an emergence of a new Pakistan as a “global peacemaker” of sorts! It is amusing indeed but what this narrative has achieved for Pakistan are brownie points of being a “global peacemaker” across the global audience that has been reeling for over two months of severe disruption in energy flows and soaring fuel prices. Thus, Pakistan has become a so-called darling of world media (which generally eats out of the US DS hands) and they have spun a wonderful narrative for Pakistan of being a global peacemaker, someone who is trying to bring stability in one of the most uncertainties times in the recent history. It’s another matter that Pakistan is fighting off Afghanistan on its western border and recently bombed and killed 400+ people in a hospital there and it continues to kill the Baluchis who are fighting for independence from Pakistan. So, what’s the endgame for Pakistan here and with that for the US DS? As I said earlier, India has been repeating time and again that Op Sindoor is not over and part 2 will begin soon and Pakistan has been on tenterhooks since the cessation of hostilities in May 2025. India has stopped/ reduced the flow of Indus basin rivers to Pakistan after it put the Indus Water Treaty in abeyance and is restarted the stalled dam projects on these rivers at a frantic pace — this will put pressure on Pakistan this summer, starting this month. So, Pakistan will in all likelihood retaliate with another terrorist attack on India in the coming days and when that happens, India will launch Op Sindoor part 2 and go for decimation of Pakistan and to that end, this “global peacemaker” narrative of Pakistan will come handy to put pressure on India to abate Op Sindoor 2 in its tracks — this is the reason why both US DS and Pakistan state has cobbled up a fake “mediator peacemaker” narrative for the failed stated of Pakistan so that it doesn’t cease to exist and the US DS continues to have a vassal state for exerting influence in this part of the world.
