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With the Islamabad cease-fire talks between the United States and Iran stalled, Pakistan is experiencing, for the first time and in the glare of the global attention, the difficulty of mediating one of the Middle East’s most intractable problems. Away from the cameras and headlines, the country is also grappling with a new problem of its own, the result of a bookkeeping change at the World Bank that greatly complicates its economic outlook.

The change took effect last July, when the bank lifted Pakistan out of its South Asia column and dropped it into a new regional grouping called MENAAP, for Middle East and North Africa, Afghanistan and Pakistan. The recategorization ties Pakistan’s economic future to the war it is trying to end.

With the Islamabad cease-fire talks between the United States and Iran stalled, Pakistan is experiencing, for the first time and in the glare of the global attention, the difficulty of mediating one of the Middle East’s most intractable problems. Away from the cameras and headlines, the country is also grappling with a new problem of its own, the result of a bookkeeping change at the World Bank that greatly complicates its economic outlook.

The change took effect last July, when the bank lifted Pakistan out of its South Asia column and dropped it into a new regional grouping called MENAAP, for Middle East and North Africa, Afghanistan and Pakistan. The recategorization ties Pakistan’s economic future to the war it is trying to end.

The bank’s most recent forecast for MENAAP, published this month, has the region (excluding Iran) growing at 1.8 percent this year—a 2.4 percentage-point downgrade from January that is the direct result of this war. The forecast for South Asia, by contrast, has the region growing at 6.3 percent—the fastest of any emerging-market region in the world, and more than three times the MENAAP rate.

Until last year, Pakistan was viewed with reference to the second number. Now it will be viewed in reference to the first.

The bank has offered no meaningful explanation for the change. Some Pakistani commentators have concluded that it is merely administrative. Four of the bank’s statisticians, explaining the move in a year-end blog post wrote that the new........

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