The poet Muhammad Iqbal, a driving force behind the creation of Pakistan as a state, writes in his book Gabriel’s Wing that even a barren field shouldn’t make one hopeless – with a little soil and water, it can bloom again. Few fields are more barren than the common ground between Iran and the US, blighted by half a century of enmity. Pakistan’s government, having thrust itself into the position of mediator since the two went to war nearly two months ago, has been tilling and watering tirelessly to keep hopes of peace alive.
The job has rarely looked harder.
Since the first peace talks in Islamabad ended abruptly on April 12, Iran and the US have barely maintained a ceasefire. They have not fired directly on each other, but instead on civilian shipping. Iran’s naval forces continue to effectively restrict access to the Strait of Hormuz for vessels not approved by Tehran, while the US has done the same for Iran-approved ships.
To Pakistan’s chagrin, rhetoric on both sides has remained combative. A new round of talks led by the same negotiators as the week before – Vice President JD Vance, envoy Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner on the US side, and Parliamentary Speaker Mohammed Bagher Ghalibaf and Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi on the Iranian team – was scheduled for April 21. Large parts of Islamabad were shut down, barricades erected and school classes cancelled. The talks were then pushed to the following day before being cancelled entirely, apparently after Iran demanded the US lift its Hormuz restrictions, which Tehran views as a breach of the ceasefire. In Islamabad, hope was visibly fading.
Then, on Friday evening, with barely an hour’s notice, Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi boarded a plane for Pakistan. He landed around 11pm at a military airfield in Rawalpindi as it began raining. Soon after, the White House said Mr Witkoff and Mr Kushner would also travel to Islamabad.
It may be Pakistan’s capital but in practice the country has two. A lush, planned and small city built in the 1960s on a grid of wide avenues and numbered sectors, Islamabad projects a controlled image of Pakistan. Rawalpindi, 15 minutes away, is the older, grittier military hub of cantonments and compounds. If Islamabad is the marbled exterior, “Pindi” is the engine room. Their dynamic reflects Pakistan itself, where the military sets the cadence for much of civilian life.
That has been evident as the US-Iran talks continue. Pakistan’s Army Chief, Field Marshal Asim Munir, is leading mediation, with Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif and his Deputy and Foreign Minister Ishaq Dar supporting.
Intense efforts
The effort has been intense. The military closed two of the city’s premier hotels – the Serena, the venue for the first round that hosted US delegates, and the Marriott for the Iranian side – and redirected guests elsewhere. Thousands of troops and police have been deployed in the city centre, with no clear end date. The financial cost to the city is considerable, as is the inconvenience to residents, many of whom have missed work or school. On Geo News, a commentator lamented that Pakistan may reopen the Strait of Hormuz before Karachi’s University Road, long under construction. Heroic efforts – and the prestige they bring – come with collective sacrifice.
I was inside the Serena on April 12, hours after Mr Vance, Mr Witkoff and Mr Kushner checked out. Staff were dismantling the temporary venue set up for what may have been where the first high-level US-Iran talks had taken place. One room stood out: a trilateral space with a triangular table, personally inspected by Field Marshal Munir, flanked by Iranian, US and Pakistani flags. It was intended for a historic signing that never happened. By the time I arrived, the table was being taken apart and flags packed away.
The layout of the talks seemed to tell a story about this peace process, too – one that may repeat itself in the next round. Pakistani mediators sat closer to the US delegation. Each side ate separately, with the Americans receiving the most prominent facilities. The US delegation stayed at the Serena; the Iranians were chauffeured over from the Marriott.
The prestige afforded to US officials reflected Pakistan’s effort to deepen ties with US President Donald Trump. Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif was among the first leaders to congratulate Mr Trump after his 2024 election victory and even nominated him for the Nobel Peace Prize. Mr Trump has in turn praised the army chief as “my favourite field marshal”.
Yet Pakistani officials stress that the relationship with Iran is deeper, intimate and unavoidable.
“You can’t choose your neighbours,” a former diplomat who served in Tehran told me. “Iran is Pakistan’s neighbour. A good relationship is not optional – it’s a strategic compulsion.”
That relationship is also complex. Maleeha Lodhi, a former ambassador to the UN, described “peaks and troughs” since Iran’s 1979 Islamic Revolution. “Pakistan was very closely aligned with the US, fighting to roll back the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Relations became quite testy between Pakistan and Iran because Tehran saw Islamabad as too close to Washington,” she said. Tension deepened in the 2000s during the US war in Afghanistan, when Iran briefly offered co-operation but was labelled by Washington as part of an “axis of evil”. Pakistan, meanwhile, was embraced as a US security partner despite ties with the Taliban.
Relations improved markedly last summer. During the 12-day Iran war involving Israel and the US, Pakistan openly backed Tehran. “The Iranians reciprocated,” Ms Lodhi said, “by expressing their gratitude and then there was a flow. I met [Supreme National Council secretary] Ali Larijani. There was a stream of Iranian visitors. They really wanted to strengthen this relationship and so did Pakistan.”
Mr Larijani was assassinated in an Israeli air strike in March, within a month of several other senior Iranian figures, including supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, being killed.
By elimination, Ms Lodhi argues, Pakistan became the only viable mediator. “Who else was there? Oman [which hosted low-level US-Iran talks to prevent the current war but that failed to do so] played a great role, no question. But this time around, its fingers got burnt.” What clinched it for Pakistan was its combination of intimacy with Tehran and, says Ms Lodhi, “obviously our relationship with Donald Trump”.
Fragile diplomacy
Even so, diplomacy is fragile. Mr Araghchi’s arrival in Tehran was marked by contradictory messaging: Iran said no meeting with US officials was planned and any messages from Tehran would be “conveyed by Pakistan”. Mr Araghchi’s trip, moreover, was a stopover as part of a larger tour to Oman and Russia.
Yet the White House story was it was the Iranians who had “reached out” and “requested the in-person conversation”. Speculation mounted in Islamabad about what this all meant. Was the White House ambushing Mr Araghchi into talks? Or was Mr Araghchi’s three-country tour a cover story for a planned encounter with the Americans?
Face-saving has become a hallmark of efforts to end the war. For Iran’s government, preserving appearances is essential to its survival. Mr Trump has made that more difficult, repeatedly calling the regime too “fractured” to negotiate coherently. On Thursday, following the US President's latest remarks in that vein, Iranians across the country received text messages assuring them the government is united. It did not help matters that since Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei was installed as his father’s successor in March, he has not been seen in public. The prevailing theory, espoused by Washington, is that he is staying hidden to avoid embarrassment over an alleged air strike injury that disfigured his face.
Some analysts believe the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), Iran’s shadowy elite security force, is driving decision-making, sidelining civilian officials like Mr Ghalibaf and Mr Araghchi. The latter, in particular, has been denounced repeatedly by IRGC-affiliated media for being too conciliatory since the talks began. In that context, it would be unsurprising if Mr Araghchi remained coy about continuing dialogue in Pakistan.
Yet the Pakistani sources I spoke to were uniformly sceptical that the IRGC could act independently. The former diplomat who served in Tehran compared the IRGC’s loyalty to the supreme leader to that of the Napoleonic Guard to Napoleon: absolute and unwavering. The chances, he said, are “very remote that the IRGC is acting on its own” and a deal with Iran is difficult simply because the new supreme leader has little appetite for compromise.
Ms Lodhi seemed to agree. The real effect of the decapitation of Iran’s leadership, she says, is not dysfunction but radicalisation. “The decapitation has, no question, brought more hardliners into decision-making.”
By contrast, Ms Lodhi says, it is Washington that seems incoherent, largely because US policy often rests on the whims of Mr Trump, who is famously unpredictable. “The paradox is that one-man rule in Washington has sent more chaotic messages than a government that was decapitated. [Claims of Iranian fracture] is part of trying to explain why the Iranians have said 'no'.”
It would have been remarkable, given the US-Iran history, if a deal were reached in the first round of talks. But to many in Pakistan, it seemed genuinely possible. That the talks were never billed as a “first round” and the ill-fated triangular table at the Serena attest to that.
Aizaz Ahmad Chaudhry, who was Pakistan’s ambassador to Washington during the first Trump administration, tells me talk of the discussions being spoilt by chaotic personalities – in the US or Iran – distract from the strides made in round one. “These two countries were very close to an agreement,” he says. “And it’s a common loss for the whole region and the world that they are still not back at the table. That’s what we are all expecting – that they should come back.”
As Saturday unfolded, the truth around Mr Araghchi’s trip was still unclear but it looked to lie somewhere in between the US and Iranian party lines. Mr Araghchi left Islamabad on Saturday evening before the US team had taken off from Washington. Pakistan’s Foreign Ministry said Mr Araghchi had “conveyed his views”, which presumably would be conveyed again to Mr Witkoff and Mr Kushner when they arrived. There was intense speculation that, depending on their reply, Mr Araghchi could make time on his way back from Oman and Russia to meet them in Pakistan. In such a scenario, Islamabad will have overseen a delicate choreography.
Much on the line
Global prestige aside, Islamabad has much on the line. While much of the narrative around its mediation efforts paints it as the favour of a mutual friend, the reality, as Pakistani officials told me with varying degrees of candour, is that the stakes for Pakistan are almost existential.
The former diplomat who served in Tehran was explicit on this. “A prolonged war has heavy costs for us,” he said, pointing out that fuel prices in Pakistan have skyrocketed in a country where even modest increases can trigger social unrest. Pakistan also shares a 900km border with Iran. A destabilised or collapsed Iranian state would pose a multitude of problems that Islamabad has neither the resources nor the bandwidth to absorb.
Islamabad has also invested decades in building a productive relationship with the IRGC to manage shared issues. What the Guards might be replaced with should the regime fall would be anyone’s guess. Ms Lodhi puts it starkly: “Pakistan has hot borders on every side. It can’t afford to have a third hot border. That’s a nightmare scenario.”
At the same time, despite the high stakes for Pakistan, Islamabad has adamantly refused to elucidate what kind of deal it would prefer. Several Pakistani officials independently repeated a similar phrase to me: that Pakistan’s role was “facilitative, not directive”.
Some expect – not without irony – the deal to look something like the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, a nuclear deal Iran reached with the EU and the US under president Barack Obama, but from which Mr Trump promptly withdrew America’s signature after taking office. Critics of the deal, which offered simple sanctions relief in exchange for Iran curbing its nuclear enrichment programme, say it failed to address Iran’s other weapons programmes or Tehran’s backing of regional proxy groups like Hezbollah in Lebanon. But those issues do not seem to have come up much in the current peace process.
Mr Chaudhry, who was serving in Washington at the time of Mr Trump’s withdrawal, says the 2015 nuclear deal “was a good agreement and could have provided a good basis for regional peace”.
Getting something more comprehensive that solves all problems at once, says Ms Lodhi, is unrealistic. “That’s not how deals are made. They were never made like that between the Russians and the Americans during the Cold War. Not even between India and Pakistan now. You do whatever you can. And good luck to the Americans if they think they’re going to get a deal substantially better than 2015,” she said.
The former Tehran-based diplomat saw it in rawer financial terms. “We live in a realist world,” he said. “The more lucrative a financial deal is drafted by the US for Iran, the better.” The biggest sweetener, he said, is that “they will be able to sell oil to the world”.
But Iran’s revolutionary ideology, he says, depends on limiting freedom at home and connection with the world abroad, and that presents a ceiling no financial package can breach. “If [the Iranian regime] were wealthy and prosperous, they would have to change their basic ideology of revolution – and they will not do that. They can’t. Otherwise, people would ask for rights.”
For the past several days I began every morning in Islamabad with the same ritual: picking up the phone and calling the Serena, then the Marriott, to see when they would reopen for regular bookings. In an information space where few, even in Pakistan’s government, seemed to know anything, the hotels’ closure and reopening plans felt like the surest barometer of what Pakistan’s army was expecting to happen, based on Field Marshal Munir’s relentless diplomatic efforts.
Every day, the window shifted. On Wednesday, after the second round of talks was called off, a man at the Marriott front desk said they could “welcome me” as early as Thursday. When that came, he sounded anxious, saying they had now been told to remain closed and that Friday or Saturday might be more realistic. On Friday, both hotels apologised profusely for the inconvenience, a woman at the Serena saying said the new schedule was “probably Monday, but maybe longer”. On Saturday morning, with Mr Araghchi in town and the White House having announced Mr Kushner and Mr Witkoff’s departure plans, the voice at the Marriott sounded tired: “Sir, you’ve seen the news on TV? It will be some time.”
Shuttle diplomacy
But by Saturday night the news said something entirely different. Only two hours after Mr Araghchi had left for Muscat, Mr Trump told Fox News that Mr Kushner and Mr Witkoff would not be going after all. “You’re not going to be making any more 18-hour flights to sit around and talk about nothing,” Mr Trump claimed to have said.
Then came the post on Truth Social, Mr Trump’s social media platform: “Too much time wasted on travelling, too much work! Besides which, there is tremendous infighting and confusion within their ‘leadership.’ Nobody knows who is in charge, including them. Also, we have all the cards, they have none! If they want to talk, all they have to do is call!!! PRESIDENT DONALD J. TRUMP”
In Islamabad, the sheer exasperation among officials having their schedules rearranged in real time on Truth Social was difficult to conceal. After so much delicate tending, the first round of talks had died. Now the second was wilting before it could even take root.
