There’s No Point in Blaming PakistanThe US-Iran negotiations are stalled for reasons that have nothing to do with the mediator.
At Tuesday’s Senate Appropriations Defense Subcommittee hearing, Lindsey Graham went looking for a culprit. Pete Hegseth was testifying about the Pentagon budget, and Graham, a foreign-policy hawk who has lobbied openly for regime change in Tehran, pressed the defense secretary about a CBS News report published the day before. Sourced to anonymous US officials, it claimed that Pakistan had quietly allowed Iranian military aircraft, including an RC-130 reconnaissance plane, to park at Nur Khan Air Base near Rawalpindi after the April 8 ceasefire — potentially shielding them from American strikes. Hegseth declined to confirm the report. “I wouldn’t want to get into the middle of these negotiations,” he said. But Graham wasn’t having it. “I don’t trust Pakistan as far as I can throw them,” he said. “If they actually have Iranian aircraft parked in Pakistan bases to protect Iranian military assets, that tells me maybe we should be looking for somebody else to mediate. No wonder this damn thing is going nowhere.” The last sentence is the giveaway. Graham was not making an analytical claim about Pakistan’s competence or its loyalties — he was identifying a scapegoat. The senator has opposed any concession to Tehran, has lobbied Trump to resume offensive operations and famously handed the president a “Make Iran Great Again” hat in Florida weeks before the war began. He needs the talks to fail. The CBS report handed him a way to blame their failure on someone other than Trump and his negotiators. That is the dynamic Islamabad now has to manage. The talks it helped midwife are stuck, for reasons that are structural and brutal. But the convenient explanation — that the mediator failed — is already being workshopped on Capitol Hill, and could all too easily harden into conventional wisdom. Start with what Pakistan actually accomplished, because it is more than most of its critics will admit. Field Marshal Asim Munir and Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif kept a line open between Washington and Tehran. The April 8 ceasefire they helped broker interrupted a war that had already killed Iran’s supreme leader, wrought destruction all over the country and rained missiles on six Gulf states. At a time when the architecture of Middle Eastern diplomacy lies in rubble, Islamabad delivered a working pause. It is also the limit of what Pakistan was ever going to be able to do. I argued in an earlier column that Islamabad was equipped to carry messages, not to negotiate peace. Still, Munir and Sharif sought the assignment, partly for the prestige and partly to bank credit with Washington, and they performed it about as well as anyone in their position could have. That they could not produce what no one could produce is now being read as a Pakistani failure. But the talks are stuck, not because of the mediator, but because the two main belligerents are looking at the same battlefield and seeing different outcomes. Washington’s 14-point proposal, delivered through Pakistan last week, reads like surrender terms: a 12-year halt to all uranium enrichment, the handover of Iran’s estimated 440 kilograms of 60-percent-enriched uranium, with the naval blockade of Iranian ports remaining in place until compliance. Such terms are imposed on regimes that lost a war. But Iran does not believe it lost. Its counter-offer, delivered Sunday, asks for American war reparations, sanctions relief, the release of frozen Iranian assets, sovereignty over the Strait of Hormuz, and the deferral of nuclear talks to a later stage. These are the demands a regime makes when it believes it survived — and survival, in this fight, was always victory. The supreme leader is dead, but the system he built is intact. The nuclear stockpile, by the evidence of Washington’s own demand for it, still exists. China and Russia helped pressure Trump into pausing offensive operations. The Houthis, Hezbollah and the Iraqi militias are bloodied but not finished. From Tehran, the contest looks like it’s heading for a draw, at worst. Two parties reading the scoreboard that differently cannot close a deal, regardless of who is holding the pen. Algeria could not have done it in 1981. Oman could not do it now. Turkey, which I argued in March was the most plausible remaining candidate, cannot do it either. The mediator question is the wrong question. It is being asked because the right question — what does Washington do when its maximum-pressure strategy produces a regime that thinks it won? — has no comfortable answer. Trump, to give him his due, did not take Graham’s bait. Within hours of the senator’s outburst, the president told reporters: “I think the Pakistanis have been great. The field marshal and the prime minister of Pakistan have been absolutely great.” He said he was not reconsidering Pakistan’s role. That was a real (and rare) act of political loyalty under pressure, against his own party’s loudest foreign-policy voice. Munir and Sharif will have drawn some reassurance from it, but they’d be foolish to rely on Trump remaining loyal for very long. This is a president who in his first term cycled through four national security advisers, two secretaries of state, and two defense secretaries; who in his second has publicly broken with and then reconciled with Volodymyr Zelensky more than once; who treats every alliance as renegotiable. If the ceasefire fully collapses — and Trump himself now says it is on “massive life support” — the search for someone to blame will resume, and Graham’s framing will be waiting on the shelf. The same president who defended Pakistan on Tuesday may, by Friday or by next month, find it convenient to agree that the mediator failed him. There is a precedent worth remembering. In the months after October 7, Qatar did exactly what the Biden administration asked it to do: keep the only working channel to Hamas open. But when the hostage talks stalled for reasons that had nothing to do with Qatari hospitality, Washington then turned on Doha, accusing it of harboring terrorists. Small states that mediate impossible crises involving great powers often pay the bill when the great powers’ strategies fail. © 2026 Bobby Ghosh |