There is a special sadness for peacemakers when their peace is destroyed in real time, and this week Pakistan is experiencing that. Just a month ago, Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif was holding up a signed memorandum of understanding between Washington and Tehran in Geneva, declaring it to be the best peace the region had seen in a generation. This week, Iran declared that document null and void, that it was in an existential conflict with the United States, and that it had buried its own supreme leader following the assassination that began it all. The paper that Pakistan spent a hundred sleepless nights quietly caught fire somewhere between June 17 and July 15.

It’s worth stopping to consider how improbable this story is. On February 28, when American and Israeli jets struck Iran and killed Ayatollah Khamenei, sparking the 2026 Iran war, no one would have thought that the country that held the room would be Pakistan. By April, however, Islamabad was hosting the highest-level talks between the US and Iran since 1979, and by June Munir had been in Tehran three times in a row and Sharif had been in Riyadh, Doha and Ankara. More talked about than talked at, Pakistan was the room in which two hostile capitals were willing to sit.

That success gave Pakistan something tangible: respect in the capitals of the Gulf countries that have grown tired of it, and a place at tables they had only heard about. Islamabad’s line has remained firmly neutral against strikes on Iran, against strikes on Gulf states, to return to the MoU, to dialogue as the only option.

However, neutrality is not control, and that’s the uncomfortable truth this week........

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