CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

Pakistan: The Country Both Sides Call When the Bombing Starts

Photograph Source: Kskhh – Public Domain

On Tuesday, as American aircraft struck Iran for a tenth consecutive night, Iran’s interior minister Eskandar Momeni flew to Islamabad. He was carrying a direct message from Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian. When he arrived, he sat down with Pakistan’s army chief, Field Marshal Asim Munir.

Tehran is at war with the world’s most powerful military. Its list of trusted messengers is short. It chose Pakistan.

This is the part of the 2026 war that the daily coverage keeps walking past. The reigning story is a duel: American firepower against Iranian defiance, with the Gulf monarchies and Israel filling out the cast. The actor holding the quietest leverage, meanwhile, is a sanctioned, debt-heavy, non-Arab state that wants nothing the war can hand it, and both sides trust it for precisely that reason.

Pakistan is not a bystander to this war. It is the reason there was ever a pause in it. The memorandum of understanding that Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif signed in June as mediator, the ceasefire that held through the spring, the shuttling between Washington and Tehran: all of it ran through a country neither combatant can afford to alienate.

Why Pakistan, and not one of the richer capitals lining up to host talks? Because Pakistan is the rare state both sides read as honest. It shares a 900-kilometre border with Iran and cannot wish the country away. It is Sunni-majority but never enlisted in the Saudi and Israeli project of isolating Tehran. It takes American money and American weapons, yet it........

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