The Secret of Pakistan’s Diplomatic Success
The country’s recent travails have given it a hard-won sense of realism.

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Pakistan’s sudden emergence as a diplomatic interlocutor in the Iran crisis is not an accident. Nor is it merely the result of geography, personal relationships, or diplomatic convenience. It reflects something deeper: a hard-earned instinct for realism that Pakistan, despite all its difficulties, has developed through decades of war, extremism, and strategic vulnerability.

At a time when Iran’s revolutionary posture has led it into deeper isolation and military conflict, Pakistan finds itself in a different position. It maintains relations with Iran, cultivates deep ties with Saudi Arabia and the Gulf, remains important to China, and keeps up channels with Washington. Pakistan has struggled with weak civilian institutions, economic underperformance, military rule, and difficult foreign policy choices. Yet these pressures have also taught it the virtues of strategic flexibility and the dangers of an excessive emphasis on ideology.

Pakistan’s role should not be exaggerated. It will not solve one of the world’s most dangerous disputes single-handedly. But its emergence as a diplomatic mediator is significant. It shows that even a troubled state can acquire diplomatic relevance when it possesses three things Iran increasingly lacks: relations to powers in mutually hostile blocs; an awareness of the risks of ideology; and the institutional discipline to prevent religious passion from becoming an independent engine of war.

I make this argument not as a political analyst, but as a religious scholar concerned with the way religious ideas shape political conduct, war, and peace. Pakistan has not solved the relationship between religion and politics. But it has learned, through suffering, that religious slogans, once militarized, do not remain under anyone’s control.

This experience pushed Pakistan toward a sober conclusion: national strength is better preserved by working through global power structures than by standing outside them in permanent defiance.

From roughly 2009 to 2016, Pakistan faced one of the most brutal waves of militant violence in its history. The Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) and allied extremist networks attacked cities, mosques, schools, military installations, and civilians. The state was forced into major military campaigns in Swat, Khyber, Waziristan, and elsewhere, learning that religious militancy, once encouraged or tolerated, can turn inward, consume society, and challenge the state itself.

For Pakistan’s military and political leadership, this was decisive. The war against the TTP forced a deep institutional reckoning. Extremist groups were no longer merely instruments of influence or distant ideological fellow travelers. They had become an existential domestic threat. Pakistan discovered that a state cannot indefinitely tolerate the language of religious militancy and still expect stability at home.

The Taliban takeover of Afghanistan in 2021 sharpened this lesson. Many in Pakistan initially believed that a friendly or ideologically familiar government in Kabul would reduce the country’s western security problem. The opposite happened. The TTP gained confidence, cross-border tensions intensified, and Pakistan confronted a bitter reality: Ideological proximity does not guarantee state cooperation.

This experience pushed Pakistan toward a sober conclusion: national strength is better preserved by working through global power structures than by standing outside them in permanent defiance. A state may engage powerful countries, navigate competing pressures, and defend its interests. But it cannot replace strategy with slogans or build security on emotional mobilization alone.

Pakistan appears to have entered a pragmatic, if imperfect, phase of civil-military accommodation. This is not an ideal constitutional model, nor should it be romanticized.

This is where Pakistan’s army chief, Field Marshal Syed Asim Munir, becomes relevant. Pakistan’s military role should be understood carefully, neither glibly celebrated nor dismissed. Its political history includes a troubled relationship between civilian institutions and the security establishment. Yet at moments of crisis, institutional continuity has often helped preserve discipline and strategic focus.

In recent years, Pakistan appears to have entered a pragmatic, if imperfect, phase of civil-military accommodation. This is not an ideal constitutional model, nor should it be romanticized. But on security, diplomacy, and economic necessity, it has given the state a degree of operational clarity Pakistan has often lacked.

Munir’s public remarks on jihad, which have stressed that the authority to declare it belongs exclusively to the state rather than private groups, should be understood in that context. Their significance lies less in one general than in a broader effort by the state to reclaim authority over religion, war, and national security. Munir often speaks in religious language and cites Quranic ideas, but that is precisely what makes the distinction important. He is not rejecting religion as public morality; he appears to be resisting its capture by non-state groups, sectarian movements or clerical entrepreneurs.

His insistence on state supremacy in matters of jihad reflects a crucial principle: Jihad cannot be reduced to a slogan, a militia project or an emotional instrument in the hands of self-appointed religious actors. In Pakistan’s experience, whenever that distinction collapsed, the result was not liberation or dignity, but militancy, internal disorder, and bloodshed.

This matters because Pakistan remains a deeply religious society. Its army and society have often drawn moral energy from the language of jihad, sacrifice, and defense of the Muslim community. The challenge was not to erase religious feeling from national life, but to discipline and constitutionalize it, so moral emotion serves state responsibility rather than militant adventurism. The same principle applies to Pakistan’s defense relationship with Saudi Arabia. For many Pakistanis, protecting the holy places in Mecca and Medina carries natural religious significance. But if such responsibility is undertaken, it belongs to lawful state policy and formal defense commitments, not private militias.

This is not an argument for military rule. It is an argument for state coherence. Pakistan’s democratic institutions still require strengthening. But in moments of crisis, states need the ability to act, speak with some unity, and prevent ideological forces from dragging national policy into chaos.

This is one of Iran’s great strategic failures. By trying to expel America from the region through ideological confrontation, it helped create conditions in which many of its neighbors felt they needed America more.

Iran represents the opposite trajectory. Since 1979, Iran has often treated foreign policy not merely as national security, but as revolutionary and religious mission. Its conflicts became part of a larger civilizational struggle. The Islamic Republic cast itself as the vanguard of resistance, the defender of the oppressed, and the center of an ideological project extending far beyond its borders.

For a time, that strategy produced influence. Iran built networks across Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, and beyond, cultivating militias and ideological allies. But it also created fear across the region. Arab states came to see Iran not merely as a neighbor, but as a revolutionary power seeking to penetrate their societies and reshape their political order.

That fear had consequences. Gulf states deepened their security relationships with the United States. Western military presence in the region became, for many governments, not simply an imposition from outside but a perceived necessity from within. This does not absolve Washington or other major powers of hypocrisy or intervention. But it complicates the standard narrative: American power in the Middle East has survived partly because regional states, frightened by revolutionary Iran and its proxies, sought external protection.

This is one of Iran’s great strategic failures. By trying to expel America from the region through ideological confrontation, it helped create conditions in which many of its neighbors felt they needed America more.

Iran’s second failure was to confuse defiance with strategy. Slogans such as “Death to America” and “Death to Israel” produced emotional clarity and a heroic vocabulary. But slogans do not change the balance of power, build a modern economy, repair institutions, develop technology or protect a currency. After nearly half a century, America has not disappeared. Israel has not disappeared. Iran, meanwhile, has endured sanctions, isolation, repression, economic strain and vulnerability.

Pakistan’s record is hardly spotless. It too has used religion politically, made grave mistakes in Afghanistan, and suffered from military dominance, weak civilian institutions, and strategic overreach. But the crucial difference is that Pakistan did not fully sacralize its conflict with the world. It did not turn foreign policy into a theology of permanent confrontation. It remained, however awkwardly, inside the international order.

States survive by understanding limits. They gain dignity not by shouting at reality, but by negotiating with it. They protect their people not by turning every conflict into a sacred battlefield, but by knowing when to fight, when to bargain, and when to preserve room for tomorrow.

That realism allowed Pakistan to pursue its core security interests while maintaining room for diplomacy. It developed nuclear capability under immense pressure — not through revolutionary theater, but through a long, patient and state-centered strategy that gave Pakistan deterrence despite its economic limitations. It preserved ties with China without severing ties with the United States. It built deep relations with Saudi Arabia and the Gulf while sharing a border and necessary channels with Iran. It criticized Western policy when necessary, but did not make hostility to the West its organizing principle.

That is why Pakistan can now play a role Iran cannot. Iran can mobilize allies and threaten retaliation. Pakistan can host conversations. Iran can dramatize resistance. Pakistan can still speak, however imperfectly, to multiple capitals. In international politics, that is a form of power.

The deeper lesson is not that Pakistan has succeeded where Iran has failed. Pakistan’s own crises are too serious for triumphalism. The lesson is more modest and more important: States survive by understanding limits. They gain dignity not by shouting at reality, but by negotiating with it. They protect their people not by turning every conflict into a sacred battlefield, but by knowing when to fight, when to bargain, and when to preserve room for tomorrow.

Iran’s tragedy is that it can claim the legacy of a great civilization, an educated people and enormous strategic depth, but too often subordinated those assets to revolutionary mythology. Pakistan’s opportunity is that its painful encounter with extremism may have taught it a different lesson: that faith cannot replace statecraft, and passion cannot replace power.

If Pakistan is wise, it will not treat its new diplomatic relevance as vanity. It should treat it as a test. The country now has a chance to show that a Muslim-majority state, deeply conscious of religion and history, can still act with realism, restraint and diplomatic intelligence.

That is the lesson the region needs. Not another sacred war. Not another heroic slogan. Not another fantasy of civilizational victory. The Middle East has had enough of those. What it needs now are states that can speak across divides, restrain ideological excess and turn strategic position into peace.

Pakistan, for once, may be positioned to do exactly that.

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The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the Middle East Broadcasting Networks.