Nixon to Trump: Pakistan’s lengthy report as backchannel between rival powers | US-Israel struggle on Iran News
Islamabad, Pakistan – In the center of 1971, on the peak of the Cold War, a Pakistani authorities airplane carrying US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger flew in a single day from Islamabad to Beijing. The journey was secret, the facilitator was Pakistan, and the geopolitical penalties had been generational.
More than 50 years later, Pakistan is as soon as once more carrying messages. Foreign Minister Ishaq Dar confirmed on March 25 that Islamabad is relaying a US 15-point ceasefire proposal to Tehran, with Turkiye and Egypt offering extra diplomatic assist, because the US-Israeli struggle in opposition to Iran stretches into its second month.
On Thursday, chief US negotiator Steve Witkoff additionally confirmed that Pakistan was transferring messages between Washington and Tehran. Hours later, President Donald Trump introduced on his social media platform, Truth Social, a 10-day pause on threatened strikes in opposition to Iranian energy vegetation, citing, in his phrases, a request from the Iranian authorities.
Iran has up to now denied that direct negotiations are going down, however Trump’s newest pause implies that his preliminary menace to assault Iran’s energy vegetation, delivered final weekend, has now been deferred twice, as Pakistan performs the a part of a key diplomatic facilitator.
The function is just not new. Pakistan brokered the key US-China backchannel in 1971 and was a key interlocutor within the Geneva Accords that helped finish the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan within the Nineteen Eighties. It additionally facilitated talks that led to the 2020 Doha Agreement and has, throughout successive governments, tried to mediate between Saudi Arabia and Iran.
Since the launch of Operation Epic Fury, the US-Israeli air marketing campaign that started in late February 2026 and killed Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei inside days, Islamabad has quietly however deeply inserted itself into the disaster, working the telephones and holding conferences with key regional actors.
Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif has spoken repeatedly to Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian. Army Chief Field Marshal Asim Munir has held at the very least one direct name with President Donald Trump. Both Sharif and Munir have additionally travelled to Saudi Arabia, with whom Pakistan signed a mutual defence settlement in September final 12 months, and which hosts a US base and has confronted Iranian assaults in current weeks.
“Pakistan’s story is told most often through the prism of conflict,” says Naghmana Hashmi, a former Pakistani ambassador to China. “Yet beneath the headlines of coups, crises, and border skirmishes runs a quieter, more consistent thread: a state that has repeatedly tried to turn its geography and Muslim-world ties into diplomatic leverage for peace,” she advised Al Jazeera.
Whether this newest spherical of diplomacy produces something sturdy stays unsure. But it has as soon as once more raised a well-known query: How and why does Pakistan preserve rising as a diplomatic dealer, and the way efficient has it been?
Opening the China channel
In August 1969, US President Richard Nixon visited Pakistan and quietly tasked the nation’s navy ruler, President Yahya Khan, with passing a message to Beijing: Washington wished to open communication with the People’s Republic of China.
At the time, the US handled Taiwan as China and didn’t recognise Beijing.
Pakistan was chosen for the diplomatic function as a result of it maintained working relations with each Washington and Beijing.
Winston Lord, who served as Kissinger’s aide and was on the flight to Beijing, described the choice in a 1998 oral historical past interview carried out by the Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training.
“We finally settled on Pakistan. Pakistan had the advantage of being a friend to both sides,” he stated.
Two years of oblique exchanges adopted, with Pakistani officers carrying messages between the 2 capitals.
Then, in July 1971, Kissinger arrived in Islamabad on a public tour of Asia. According to historic data and accounts from key members, he appeared to fall sick at a welcome dinner.
In the early hours of July 9, Yahya Khan’s driver took Kissinger and three aides to a navy airfield, the place a Pakistani authorities airplane was ready with 4 Chinese representatives on board. The plane flew to Beijing in a single day, whereas a decoy automotive headed to the hill resort of Nathia Gali, about three hours from Islamabad.
Kissinger spent 48 hours in conferences with Chinese chief Zhou Enlai earlier than returning to Pakistan. The journey paved the way in which for Nixon’s go to to Beijing in February 1972, and the well-known handshake with Chinese chief Mao Zedong that led to a detente between the 2 nations, and the US recognition of communist China.
Kissinger later acknowledged in an interview with information journal The Atlantic that the Nixon administration had declined to publicly condemn Pakistani military actions in East Pakistan, which contributed to the creation of Bangladesh in December 1971.
According to him, doing so “would have destroyed the Pakistani channel, which would be needed for months to complete the opening to China, which indeed was launched from Pakistan”.
Masood Khan, who served as Pakistan’s ambassador to the United States and later to the United Nations, says the episode mirrored one thing structural.
“In 1971, Pakistan was the only country that could be trusted simultaneously in Washington and Beijing with a very sensitive mission, which was kept secret even from the State Department,” he advised Al Jazeera.
“But beyond trust, Pakistan had also acquired the requisite strategic manoeuvrability and operational flexibility that suit interlocutors caught in an apparently irredeemable situation,” Khan added.
Muhammad Faisal, a Sydney-based overseas coverage analyst, referred to as it Pakistan’s defining diplomatic second.
“Pakistan’s facilitation of the US-China backchannel is unambiguously the most consequential. It restructured Cold War geopolitics in ways that still define the international order. No other Pakistani facilitation comes close in scale or permanence,” he stated.
But he additionally factors to its limits.
“Pakistan couldn’t turn that support from both powers to its advantage in the 1971 civil conflict and the subsequent war with India. Despite being on good terms with both China and the US, Pakistan couldn’t deter India from taking advantage of the civil conflict,” he added.
Pakistan’s function in Afghan diplomacy spans 4 many years and doesn’t all the time match neatly into the class of impartial brokering.
An early occasion got here within the Nineteen Eighties, following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979.
Pakistan turned the first conduit for US, Saudi and Chinese navy and monetary help to the Afghan mujahideen, with its intelligence company, the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), organising and directing the resistance.
From June 1982, a United Nations-mediated course of started in Geneva. Since Pakistan refused to recognise the Soviet-backed Kabul authorities, negotiations had been carried out not directly.
The Geneva Accords had been finally signed on April 14, 1988, by the overseas ministers of Afghanistan and Pakistan, with the United States and the Soviet Union as guarantors. They set a timetable for Soviet withdrawal, accomplished by February 1989.
As Khan noticed, Pakistan occupied a twin function. “It was both a stakeholder and a mediator,” he stated, a distinction that may form its Afghan coverage for many years.
Nearly three many years later, in July 2015, Pakistan hosted the primary formally acknowledged direct talks between the Taliban and the Afghan authorities of then-President Ashraf Ghani in Murree, close to Islamabad, with US and Chinese officers attending as observers.
The Taliban, who had dominated Afghanistan from 1996 till being overthrown after the 9/11 assaults in 2001, had been then waging a revolt in opposition to US and NATO forces. Pakistan, extensively seen as having affect over the group, performed a key facilitating function.
During the next US-Taliban negotiations that led to the Doha Agreement in 2020, Pakistan’s involvement was much less seen however remained central.
US envoy Zalmay Khalilzad repeatedly acknowledged that Pakistani strain on Taliban management helped maintain the talks.
Faisal stated it’s unclear what the settlement delivered for Pakistan.
“Pakistan did bring the Taliban interlocutors to the table. However, the outcome, the rushed US exit and the Taliban takeover, did not secure Pakistan’s own medium-to-long term interests,” he stated.
Today, Pakistan and the Taliban-ruled Afghanistan are locked in a struggle, each firing at one another. And the Taliban has grown near Pakistan’s South Asian rival, India.
Saudi-Iran: efforts with out outcomes
Few diplomatic efforts have absorbed extra Pakistani vitality with much less to indicate than makes an attempt to ease tensions between Riyadh and Tehran, say analysts.
In January 2016, after protesters ransacked Saudi diplomatic missions in Iran, then-Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, elder brother of present premier Shehbaz, flew to each capitals in a single journey alongside then-Army chief General Raheel Sharif.
Within days, nevertheless, Saudi Foreign Minister Adel al-Jubeir publicly denied that any formal mediation had been agreed.
In October 2019, after drone and missile assaults on Saudi Aramco services at Abqaiq and Khurais briefly halved the dominion’s oil output, Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan undertook shuttle diplomacy between Tehran and Riyadh.
Khan stated that Trump, then in his first time period, had personally requested him to “facilitate some sort of dialogue”. Iranian officers stated on the time they had been unaware of any formal mediation course of.
When China brokered the restoration of Saudi-Iran diplomatic ties in Beijing in March 2023, Pakistan’s Foreign Office famous that the primary direct contact between the 2 sides since 2016 had taken place on the sidelines of a summit of Islamic nations hosted by Islamabad a 12 months earlier.
Khan, the diplomat, rejects the view that China’s function within the 2023 breakthrough represented a Pakistani failure.
“China should get all the credit for the culmination of the Iran-Saudi rapprochement, but Beijing would recognise that Pakistan paved the way for it,” he stated.
“Pakistan’s forte is opening channels, building confidence, and hosting indirect, proximity talks. This kind of facilitation is foundational in any kind of mediation and subsequent conciliation, arbitration, and agreements,” he added.
Attempt at peace in Middle East
In September 2005, Pakistan’s Foreign Minister Khurshid Mahmud Kasuri met his Israeli counterpart Silvan Shalom in Istanbul, marking the primary publicly acknowledged official contact between the 2 nations.
In his memoir, Neither a Hawk Nor a Dove, Kasuri described the assembly as an try to show Pakistan’s nonrecognition of Israel into diplomatic leverage, utilizing its credibility in Arab and Muslim capitals as a conduit, contingent on progress in direction of Palestinian statehood.
Shalom referred to as the talks “a huge breakthrough”. But the initiative didn’t survive home opposition.
Protests erupted in Pakistan, which doesn’t recognise Israel. No follow-up assembly occurred, and no structured course of emerged.
Recurring diplomacy
Faisal attributes Pakistan’s recurring diplomatic function to enduring structural components.
“Pakistan’s access is linked to its geography and its regional relationships amid many fault lines that it straddles,” he stated.
“Iran cannot ignore Pakistan because it is home to the largest Shia population outside Iran. For the US, ignoring Pakistan, a nuclear-armed Muslim-majority nation straddling the broader Middle East and South Asia with close ties to China, comes at its own risk.”
Khan rejects the suggestion — made by some analysts — that Pakistan’s mediation is pushed primarily by Washington.
“To suggest that Pakistan has always opted for mediation at the behest of the US is a reductive construct. Mediation is in the DNA of Pakistan’s diplomacy,” he stated.
“Pakistan does not pursue bloc politics and prefers to maintain equidistant relations with Washington, Beijing, Tehran, Riyadh, and other Gulf states. It is aligned, but not a camp follower.”
Yet the present Iran mediation carries increased stakes than most up-to-date efforts.
“Pakistan now enjoys trust in Washington, Tehran and the Gulf capitals,” Khan stated. “No other country in the region has that kind of leverage.”
