Quiet Pakistani diplomacy that turned a corner
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admin
- July 5, 2026
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When the history of this year’s Gulf war is written, a podcast recorded in Doha may prove one of its more revealing primary sources. In a rare interview on the CIRS Long View, the podcast of Georgetown University in Qatar’s Center for International and Regional Studies, conducted by the university’s Maryam Daud recently, Pakistan’s ambassador to Qatar, Muhammad Aamer, offered the fullest account yet from a serving Pakistani diplomat of how Islamabad manoeuvred two implacable adversaries — the United States and Iran — into the same room for the first time since 1979. The conversation catches Pakistani diplomacy at the moment of its vindication, and the ambassador in a mood both expansive and studiedly prudent. The first puzzle put to him is the one that has exercised chancelleries everywhere: how did a country that exchanged missile strikes with Iran in 2024 become, two years later, the venue of which Tehran’s envoy could say, “We will negotiate nowhere else but Islamabad”? Ambassador Aamer’s answer was a deliberate widening of the lens. Pakistan’s position, he insisted, “is not a one-off thing which just propped up because of the circumstances”. He invoked geography, a 900-kilometre shared border, cultural affinity and — pointedly — “the power structure of Pakistan, being a nuclear state”. As for the 2024 turbulence: “We sat down, we ironed out the differences, and we moved forward from that. We came out of that difficult situation very amicably and with a lot of trust developed at the end.” The connoisseur will notice what is being done here. The 2024 clash is recast not as a liability but as a credential — proof that Pakistan and Iran possess a functioning machinery for de-escalation. In the grammar of mediation, having survived a crisis with one of the parties is worth more than never having quarrelled at all. Equally instructive was the ambassador’s treatment of the vacuum question. When pressed on whether Pakistan rose because the conventional mediators were caught in the crossfire or sidelined, he was gracious but unambiguous. Qatar, he said, is “a powerhouse of mediation and negotiations”, yet “the situation became such that Pakistan had to come in. Pakistan had to fill the vacuum.” Reading between the lines, the admission is significant: when Iranian strikes reached Gulf infrastructure, the region’s brokers became stakeholders in the war itself. Mediation migrated to the nearest credible actor standing just outside the blast radius — a nuclear-armed neighbour with equities on every side but wounds on none. The Pakistani envoy recalled the early 1970s, when “it was Pakistan which brought both the countries together” and an American president (Richard Nixon) “flew from Pakistan to China”. The analogy is not idle. Then as now, Pakistan’s utility lay precisely in the richness of its portfolio — a defence pact with Saudi Arabia, “people-to-people contact” and “cultural affinities” with Iran, security ties with Washington dating to the 1950s. “Diplomacy,” he observed, “is the game of maintaining balance and walking on the tightrope successfully.” On the mechanics of the talks themselves — three rounds, 21 hours, delegations facing each other across a table in April — the ambassador declined the invitation to storytell, and in declining delivered the interview’s most quotable arithmetic. “You mentioned about 21 hours, but you don’t know how many hours went in before that particular event,” he said, estimating “2,100 hours — maybe before that, and many more hours after that — which did not let the process die down.” What the visible hours produced, in his telling, was almost physical in its symbolism: the two sides “entered the same room, sat at the same table, looked eye to eye with each other, and even shook hands after decades.” His defence of the process against the charge of failure was equally deft. “I think negotiations never failed. I think the expectations of the people — and especially the detractors — they failed.” A conflict “rooted in history” and “layered” with technicalities was never going to be resolved “in one sitting... in a theoretical exercise, in a classroom”. Here he deployed Churchill: “Meeting jaw to jaw is better than war.” The line is doing real work. It reframes the metric of success from outcomes to contact — and by that metric, April 2026 was already historic before a word of the Accord was drafted. Perhaps, the most analytically interesting stretch concerned what one might call the political economy of the memorandum. A contrast was drawn with the JCPOA (Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action — the 2015 nuclear agreement between Iran and the US, UK, France, Russia, China, plus Germany, along with the EU) — a Western-led instrument backed by sanctions and the implicit threat of punishment. The Islamabad Memorandum, by comparison, is the product of a mediator with no coercive leverage whatsoever — and Ambassador Aamer embraced the distinction as a philosophy. “Why not mediate with sincerity? Why not mediate with frankness?... And why not mediate without getting any benefit out of this?” Diplomacy of equals, in other words, offered as a structural alternative to diplomacy of compulsion. Whether goodwill can substitute for enforcement over the long haul is the memorandum’s great untested proposition; but as an origin story, it is a genuine departure from the region’s recent treaty-making. The ambassador was careful, too, not to let the rise of the so-called Middle East Quadrilateral — Egypt, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Turkiye — whose foreign ministers have met in Riyadh, Islamabad and Antalya in a relatively short span of time — be read as an obituary for multilateralism. Regional powers stepped in, he argued, because “the regional stakes were important” and they acted “in proximity” and “indigenously”, but “it doesn’t mean that multilateralism has finished”. He reached for the famous consolation offered by Swedish diplomat and economist Dag Hammarskjöld, who served as the second Secretary-General of the world body: the United Nations “is not created to take mankind to heaven; it has been created to save us from hell”. It was a shrewd hedge — claiming the middle-power moment while keeping Pakistan’s UN credentials, including its own resolution on mediation, firmly in view. Nor did the ambassador flinch from the question of self-interest. With millions of Pakistanis in the Gulf and heavy energy dependence on the region, Pakistan’s stake in de-escalation is existential as much as ethical. He converted the point into a closing flourish: “If you say our skin is into it — well, not only our skin; our mind and heart are also into it. And that’s why we are successful.” His parting counsel to Washington and Tehran was that of a professional wearied by performative statecraft: open direct channels “rather than depending on somebody else, rather than using social media only for communication”, because diplomacy “needs a lot of thought before uttering even a single word”. The Islamabad Accord will be judged by whether it holds. But this interview already establishes something durable: a doctrine of mediation — patient, unglamorous, uncoerced — articulated from Doha by the ambassador of the country that made the handshake possible. Scan the QR code to watch/listen to the episode:https://youtu.be/4-zTjl9A7Hc?si=KoLH9DPhAgmP3OOL The writer is Deputy Managing Editor, Gulf Times
