Mushtaq Yusufzai is a journalist based in Peshawar, Pakistan.
PESHAWAR, Pakistan — Pakistan is working feverishly to end a war in one country on its border, even as it has declared “open war” on another. The South Asian nation has emerged as an unlikely mediator in global efforts to end the U.
S.-Israeli war with Iran. But it is also engaged in its most severe fighting in decades with neighboring Afghanistan, a conflict that has been largely overshadowed by the war in the Middle East. Pakistan has offered its capital, Islamabad, as a potential meeting site for U.S. and Iranian negotiators, with President Donald Trump saying “great progress” is being made toward talks and Tehran denying there are talks happening at all. Trump, who is set to address the nation Wednesday night, also told NBC News on Tuesday that Iran does not have to make a deal for the conflict to end. If talks do happen, however, Pakistan wants to be the one to host them. The country of more than 250 million people is seeking greater regional influence, and it also has a lot to lose if the war continues, with Iran’s shutdown of the Strait of Hormuz blocking almost all of Pakistan’s oil and gas imports. Pakistan has already helped the U.S. send Iran a 15-point ceasefire proposal, though Tehran responded with suspicion. This week, it also hosted two days of talks in Islamabad with the foreign ministers of Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Egypt, three other regional powers seeking de-escalation of the conflict. Pakistan has “full support” from those countries as host of the talks, Foreign Minister Ishaq Dar said, as well as from China, which on Tuesday issued a five-point initiative for peace with Pakistan as Dar was visiting Beijing. “Pakistan will be honored to host and facilitate meaningful talks between the two sides in coming days,” he said earlier this week, adding that both the U.S. and Iran “have expressed their confidence in Pakistan to facilitate the talks.” Even as the foreign ministers were discussing how to end the Iran war in Islamabad on Sunday, Pakistan was trading heavy fire with Afghanistan, as the two countries began the second month of a conflict that has killed civilians on both sides. The Afghan government said one person had been killed and more than a dozen others wounded, mostly women and children, by Pakistani shelling outside the eastern city of Asadabad. Pakistan officials denied targeting civilian areas and said they were only responding to Afghan attacks, Reuters reported. Afghanistan is also still reeling from an apparent Pakistani airstrike on a drug rehabilitation center in Kabul on March 16. The United Nations, which condemned the strike, said at least 143 people were killed. On Thursday, in the second mass funeral for victims of the strike, dozens of people were buried in Kabul, with pictures showing bulldozers digging 60 graves. Pakistan denies targeting the civilian facility, a former NATO and U.S. military base, saying it “precisely targeted military installations and terrorist support infrastructure.” Amnesty International says the site’s use as a drug rehabilitation center has been well documented since 2016 and that “any reasonable assessment and information gathering would have concluded that the camp had a high civilian presence.” Vantor satellite imagery of the site from three days before the strike shows groups of people gathered in the treatment center’s courtyard. Pakistan blames Afghanistan for a surge in militant attacks since the U.S. withdrew in 2021, though the Taliban deny that militants are using Afghanistan as a base. Years of diplomatic efforts to address the issue have failed, said Ali Sarwar Naqvi, a former Pakistani diplomat and executive director of the Center for International Strategic Studies, an Islamabad-based think tank. “There’s this wrong impression that we are waging a war against Afghanistan,” he said, when “the Afghans are the ones who have been allowing terrorist acts to be carried out against Pakistan.” The conflict threatens to further destabilize a region where terrorist outfits such as the Islamic State group and Al Qaeda are trying to remobilize. When it comes to Iran peace talks, “the challenge is ensuring that Pakistan’s ambitions don’t collapse under the weight of the contradictions of its internal instabilities and regional instabilities,” said Chietigj Bajpaee, a senior research fellow for South Asia at Chatham House, a London-based think tank. But if Pakistan is able to hold the talks successfully, “this would be a feather in their cap,” he said. “Its status with the U.S., its status in the Islamic world, and status in South Asia, would go up,” Bajpaee said. Pakistan is in a “unique position” to mediate in the Iran war because it has good relations with all five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council — the U.S., Britain, China, France and Russia — and is also a current member of the council itself, Naqvi said. “Therefore we should play our rightful role of trying to bring the combatants together,” he said. Pakistan’s relations with the U.S. have improved considerably under Trump, who met twice last year with Pakistan’s powerful army chief, Field Marshal Asim Munir, and has called him his “favorite field marshal.” Pakistan also curried favor by joining Trump’s Board of Peace and nominating him for the Nobel Peace Prize. But the Iran war is highly unpopular in Pakistan, which has the world’s second-largest population of Shia Muslims after Iran. When a U.S.-Israeli strike killed Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader and a central figure in Shia Islam, demonstrators marched toward U.S. diplomatic missions in deadly protests. There are other potential stumbling blocks in Pakistan’s peace efforts, Bajpaee said. For one thing, Pakistan has no formal ties with Israel, which doesn’t appear to be involved in any U.S.-Iran talks and has vowed continued strikes. And while Pakistan and Iran have strong cultural and religious ties, their relationship has also been under strain, said Rajiv Dogra, a former Indian diplomat who was based in Pakistan, with the two countries exchanging strikes in 2024 over Baloch separatists operating on both sides of the border. Dogra also cited Pakistan’s failure to protect its minority Shia Muslims from targeted attacks by Sunni militants. “All this is noted in Tehran and noted with displeasure,” he added. During a call Saturday with Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif, Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian praised Pakistan’s peace efforts but stressed “the need to build trust,” according to a Pakistani readout of the call. Nonetheless, Iran has referred to Pakistan as a friendly nation in recent days, and according to Pakistan is allowing 20 more Pakistani-flagged ships to transit the Strait of Hormuz after 10 passed through last week. Pakistan has long played a central role in U.S. dealings across the region. In 1971, Henry Kissinger famously traveled to China secretly via Pakistan ahead of President Richard Nixon’s historic visit to Beijing. Pakistan also helped facilitate the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan in the 1980s and the U.S. deal with the Taliban ending their war in Afghanistan during Trump’s first term. “We have done a number of times this kind of work to establish peace and stability in the region,” Naqvi said. “That is our objective.” Mushtaq Yusufzai reported from Peshawar, Pakistan, Mithil Aggarwal from New Delhi and Marin Scott from New York.
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