If there was one unmistakable message emerging from the corridors of the United Nations in New York this week, it was this: Pakistan is no longer a country the international community can conveniently overlook. The contrast with only a few years ago is striking. Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif and Foreign Minister Ishaq Dar arrived for the 81st session of the UN General Assembly with Pakistan occupying a noticeably more prominent place in international diplomacy. Their schedules reflected it: meetings, consultations and engagements with world leaders at a time when the Middle East is in crisis and the international system is struggling to contain multiple conflicts. Reporting from New York described Pakistan as standing out amid the flurry of UN diplomacy.

The transformation did not begin in New York. A major turning point was the four-day India-Pakistan military confrontation in May 2025 following India's launch of Operation Sindoor. Whatever competing claims New Delhi and Islamabad continue to make about the military outcome, the diplomatic consequences have become increasingly difficult to ignore. Consider what US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said in New York. Discussing what he described as the failure of the existing international system to resolve conflicts, Rubio specifically cited India and Pakistan as an example of the sort of dangerous confrontation a functioning global order should be capable of addressing. That matters. For decades, India's position has been that Kashmir is essentially a bilateral matter between India and Pakistan and that there is no role for outside mediation. Pakistan, conversely, has consistently sought international involvement and highlighted UN resolutions on the dispute.

Rubio did not explicitly propose mediation over Kashmir in those remarks, and it would be inaccurate to claim that he did. But the significance is still considerable: at the........

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