Pakistan’s Return As Peacemaker: Mediator Or Middle East Asset?

As someone who grew up in a border region in the 1980s and early 1990s, where Urdu was the official language of Jammu and Kashmir, and a language close to urban Punjabi served as the native language, television often became a site of small but spirited conflicts among siblings. The choice typically being between American shows aired on Pakistan Television and Doordarshan, India’s state media.

To be honest, many of the shows we watched were outstanding American productions ranging from Roots, the powerful saga of African American history, to Matlock, a legal series. Early on, I often struggled to follow some of these and would instead push for lighter programming on Doordarshan. At the same time, there were numerous shows on Pakistan Television that I could both watch and understand, including Full House and Sesame Street; the list felt almost endless.

There was also a clear class dimension to this exposure as only a few could fully grasp or contextualize what they were watching. Even so, I vividly recall how, the next day at school, conversations would revolve around some shows that children anywhere could watch. Programmes on Pakistan Television, such as Airwolf and Knight Rider, which required little familiarity with American history, were especially popular and widely discussed among children. In that period, because of geographical proximity, there was also the telling fact that even a broken television antenna would easily pick up Pakistan Television broadcasts, whereas one had to constantly adjust them just to catch Doordarshan, which then had weak signals in my area. It also meant that we often had little in common to discuss about TV shows with our cousins in Delhi as we were, in many ways, growing up in entirely different cultural universes. Even today, when I speak with American friends, they are often surprised that I watched many of the same shows they did an unlikely overlap shaped by geography, geopolitics, signal reach, and circumstance.

Recent developments amid the ongoing Iran crisis have triggered renewed speculation about Pakistan’s attempt to position itself as a mediator between Washington and Tehran. Analysts and practitioners, depending on their vantage point, have pointed to multiple explanations. This has ranged from rare earth considerations and possible Middle East deployments to cryptocurrency linkages and more conventional diplomatic maneuvering. Within this fluid context, Islamabad has emerged as an unlikely but significant diplomatic venue, having hosted the first round of talks between the United States and the Islamic Republic of Iran which is arguably the most consequential direct engagement between the two since 1979. While the initial round ended without a breakthrough, it succeeded in reopening a channel of communication at a moment of heightened regional tension. The fact that both sides are now signalling a willingness to return for a second round underscores not only the urgency of de-escalation but also Pakistan’s growing relevance as a facilitator in an increasingly fractured geopolitical landscape.

A degree of surprise is reflected in parts of the commentary among South Asian watchers. While each may carry some weight, they miss a deeper structural reality and that is rooted to anyone who has seen this relationship play out closely. While the realities of the Cold War have changed, one enduring outcome remains: it prepared sections of the Pakistani elite better than any other South Asian counterparts to understand the social realities and key reference points of the United States’ political, cultural, and societal landscape. This is easily verifiable in the prominence of cultural figures of Pakistani origin, including first-generation, in the United States, particularly in popular television. Shows such as Ms. Marvel, featuring Pakistani-American narratives at their core, and comedians like even first generation Pakistani Americans Kumail Nanjiani—known for Silicon Valley and The Big Sick reflect a familiarity with American cultural idioms.

Coming to hard geopolitics and geoeconomics, the U.S. relations with India in the South Asian context have gained clear ascendancy over the past three decades and they have little parallel in the region, primarily grounded in size and scale. The reasons are well known: the expansion of India’s market following Manmohan Singh’s economic liberalisation, the growing influence of the Indian-American community, and Washington’s strategic interest in positioning India as a counterweight to China. Yet, this framework captures only part of the picture. The U.S. national security calculations operate on a wider canvas, shaped not just by economic opportunity or balancing strategies, but by enduring geographical and historical imperatives. It is within this deeper matrix that Pakistan continues to retain its relevance.

Anyone who has closely engaged with U.S. or even multilateral bureaucratic structures, where the US organisational structures are often mirrored, will recognise a persistent pattern: Pakistan is rarely viewed in Washington as a purely South Asian state. Instead, across key institutional frameworks, it is habitually treated as part of the broader Middle East strategic theatre. This embedded perception, more than episodic geopolitical developments, explains the recurring resilience of U.S.–Pakistan ties. The continuity in U.S.–Pakistan relations lies not in transient incentives but in institutional design.

Within the U.S. defense architecture, Pakistan is embedded in the same strategic grid as the Middle East. The Pentagon’s Central Command (CENTCOM) places Pakistan within its Area of Responsibility alongside key Middle Eastern states, while deliberately excluding India. This is not an administrative coincidence as it reflects how U.S. planners conceptualise logistical corridors, military basing, and overlapping threat environments. Even within the State Department, where Pakistan formally sits under the Bureau of South and Central Asian Affairs, functional policymaking often aligns it with the “Near East.” Counterterrorism, energy security, and Islamic world engagement routinely bring Pakistan into the same analytical frame as Gulf states. At higher strategic levels, particularly within National Security Council deliberations, these boundaries blur further.

In effect, Pakistan is bureaucratically and therefore strategically imagined as part of the Middle East ecosystem. This perception has deep historical roots. During the Cold War, Pakistan functioned as a bridge between U.S. Middle East policy and its Asian flank, exemplified by its role in CENTO and later in facilitating Henry Kissinger’s secret opening to China. During the Soviet-Afghan war, as is widely known, Pakistan became the operational hub through which U.S. strategy in a region spanning Central and West Asia was executed. These patterns did not disappear with the end of Cold War; they merely adapted.

Republican administrations, in particular, have tended to reinforce this security-centric framing. From Eisenhower to Reagan to George W. Bush, the U.S. policy repeatedly privileged military-to-military engagement with Pakistan, often subordinating democratic or civilian considerations. This approach mirrors Washington’s broader Middle East playbook, where strategic stability has frequently trumped political reform. The parallel is not incidental and it is structural. Even ideologically, unexpected alignments have emerged. During the Reagan era, a religiously infused anti-communist narrative found resonance with Pakistan’s Islamic identity, reinforcing a partnership that might otherwise have appeared contradictory. Such overlaps further anchored Pakistan within the same conceptual universe as key Middle Eastern allies. This institutional mindset also explains why Pakistan’s relevance persists even when its immediate utility appears diminished.

The structural framing also explains a pattern that often appears contradictory: the U.S.–Pakistan relationship has been marked not by steady continuity, but by sharp cycles of engagement, rupture, and re-engagement. From the close alignment of the Cold War alliances and cooperation during the Soviet-Afghan war, to the sanctions and estrangement of the 1990s following Pakistan’s nuclear programme, the relationship has repeatedly oscillated. After 9/11, Pakistan once again became central to U.S. strategy, only for ties to fray during the later years of the Afghanistan war amid mutual mistrust.

More recently, the downturn became even more visible. The latter part of the George W. Bush administration and much of the Obama presidency were marked by growing friction over counterterrorism priorities and safe havens. Under President Trump, the relationship reached a nadir, publicly characterised by accusations of “lies and deceit” and a sharp reduction in security assistance. The Biden years saw a quieter but no less significant disengagement, as Washington’s strategic focus shifted toward great power competition and the Indo-Pacific. Yet these disruptions, while real, did not dismantle the deeper logic underpinning the relationship. If anything, they reveal its underlying resilience.

Geography and demographics remain decisive: Pakistan borders Iran, sits adjacent to the Gulf’s extended strategic space, and retains deep political, economic, and military linkages with key Middle Eastern states. For Washington, this situates Pakistan less as a peripheral South Asian actor and more as an integral node within a wider West Asian security architecture. The existence of a longstanding security understanding between Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, reinforced by the recent deployment of Pakistani troops to the Kingdom, adds another layer to this dynamic. Guarding the Kingdom is often framed by Pakistan’s military and political elite not merely as a strategic commitment but as a quasi-religious obligation tied to the custodianship of Islam’s holiest sites. Yet this very posture presents Islamabad with a structural dilemma: defending Saudi Arabia risks placing it in implicit tension with Iran while also aggravating Pakistan’s own sectarian fault lines. Pakistan’s is home to the world’s second-largest Shia population after Iran. Within this fluid and intersecting matrix of geography, security commitments, and sectarian demography, Pakistan’s role becomes not optional but necessary for its own internal stability.

There is also an added strategic dimension to Islamabad’s role. Its proximity to China, often described as Pakistan’s “all-weather friend”, has quietly acted as a catalyst in sustaining these talks. China’s deep economic and energy linkages with Iran give it significant, if understated, leverage: Beijing remains Tehran’s largest oil customer, creating an asymmetric yet mutually beneficial dependence that incentivises de-escalation, particularly at a time when disruptions in the Strait of Hormuz threaten China’s energy security. Though China has sought to hedge against such vulnerabilities, by building substantial strategic oil reserves and progressively increasing the share of non-oil sources in its energy consumption, its exposure to Gulf stability remains significant. The United States is acutely conscious of this dynamic; engaging in Islamabad allows Washington not only to reopen a channel with Tehran but also to operate within a geopolitical space where Chinese influence over Iran is already embedded.

In that sense, what appeared in childhood as a simple contest over television channels was, in retrospect, a window into a deeper structural reality. The same exposure that allowed a generation on this side of the border to grow up watching American shows through Pakistan Television also, over time, cultivated within sections of Pakistan’s elite a familiarity with the language, instincts, and cultural codes of the United States. This layered familiarity, when combined with geography and institutional positioning, helps explain why Pakistan continues to surface not merely as a participant, but as a recurring intermediary in Washington’s Middle East calculus. Seen in this light, Islamabad’s current role in facilitating U.S.–Iran engagement is neither episodic nor accidental; it reflects a durable pattern shaped by history, bureaucracy, and geostrategy. Understanding this pattern requires moving beyond episodic explanations toward a more grounded appreciation of the structural forces, geographical, institutional, and demographic, that continue to anchor Pakistan within the region’s evolving strategic landscape.