Double-dealing Pakistan is the danger looming over – Latest News
President Donald Trump’s two-week cease-fire with Iran is a big gamble — and permitting Pakistan to behave as the go-between solely raises the stakes.
Pakistan, after all, is the nation the place Osama bin Laden discovered refuge for a decade after the 9/11 massacres.
It’s the place the Taliban loved sanctuary for 20 years whereas persevering with to kill US and NATO troops on its manner back to energy in Afghanistan.
Awami Rickshaw Union employees maintain posters of Pakistan’s Chief of Army Staff Field Marshal Asim Munir, after the United States and Iran agreed to a two-week ceasefire, in Lahore on April 8, 2026. AFP through Getty Images
And at this time, Pakistan serves as China’s regional agent.
Tehran, with Islamabad’s help, has supplied a 10-point plan as a baseline for negotiations.
But it’s a unhealthy deal that the US shouldn’t take significantly.
Iran isn’t offering concessions on its ballistic missile program, or pledging to unwind its web of terror proxies throughout the area.
There’s no dedication to dismantle militias, halt weapons transfers or roll back threats to US forces and allies.
Instead, Tehran is demanding sweeping sanctions reduction, an financial lifeline that might pour billions back into regime coffers.
On the most important subject, nuclear enrichment, Tehran calls for the proper to complement uranium because it pleases, with no set limits on how far it will possibly go.
That’s an apparent non-starter, preserving Iran’s potential path to a nuclear weapon.
It must be a tip-off that the total offer has been made in unhealthy religion.
Yet Trump has allowed Pakistan to place itself as the bridge between the US and Iran forward of negotiations in Islamabad this weekend.
For its own causes, Pakistan does need peace, however a peace that favors Iran.
It’s appearing much less as an trustworthy broker — and more as Tehran’s lawyer.
Under Field Marshal Asim Munir, Pakistan’s military chief and de facto ruler, Islamabad has moved to ingratiate itself with Trump.
Last 12 months it handed over a suspect tied to the Abbey Gate bombing that killed 13 US servicemembers during the chaotic Afghanistan withdrawal, and nominated Trump for a Nobel Peace Prize.
Pakistan has additionally taken a seat at the desk of the Board of Peace — Trump’s effort to remake Gaza into a hub of “opportunity, hope, and vitality” — in its persevering with effort to curry favor with Trump and money in on his Middle East imaginative and prescient.
Trump had a clearer view of Pakistan in his first time period.
In 2018, he complained that regardless of receiving $33 billion of US help over 15 years, Islamabad delivered solely “lies and deceit.”
Correctly, Trump added, “They give safe haven to the terrorists we hunt in Afghanistan, with little help. No more!”
Trump ought to recall that intuition now as Pakistan seeks to broker a deal that can protect Tehran from sustained American navy stress.
Pakistan and Iran share a porous border that runs by insurgency-plagued areas.
A destabilized Iran would spill violence and refugees throughout that frontier and intensify militant exercise that Pakistan already struggles to comprise.
At the similar time, Pakistan relies upon closely on Gulf vitality imports.
Disruption to transport by the Strait of Hormuz has severely weakened its financial system.
Islamabad’s protection ties with Saudi Arabia are one more reason why Pakistan needs to finish this warfare.
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Continued Iranian assaults on Saudi territory might drive Islamabad to decide on between mates, risking backlash at home.
Pakistan has the second-largest Shiite Muslim population in the world after Iran, and the warfare is already inflaming sectarian tensions: Violent protests erupted in Karachi and elsewhere final month following the death of Ali Khamenei.
More important, although, is Pakistan’s more and more close alignment with China.
Islamabad operates Beijing’s most superior weapon systems and trains carefully with the People’s Liberation Army.
Pakistan anchors China’s strategic footprint in the Indian Ocean, giving Beijing entry to crucial maritime routes and a place close to key world vitality corridors.
China, for its own financial benefit, is intent on restoring steady vitality flows from the Gulf, and it’s additionally sought to place itself as a guarantor of regional vitality stability in Asia, a function long dominated by the United States.
Beijing has publicly backed Pakistan’s mediation effort, utilizing its ties with Tehran to nudge it towards negotiations.
That stress is meant to secure an association that pauses the warfare whereas defending the regime itself.
In his first time period, Trump skilled Pakistan’s unreliability up close.
Islamabad in 2020 helped carry the Taliban to the negotiating desk, incomes credit as a facilitator.
That deal supposedly included provisions that might forestall al Qaeda from taking benefit of US concessions — however turned out to be merely window dressing.
The settlement paved the manner for the disastrous US withdrawal from Afghanistan and the Taliban’s return to energy in 2021.
The dangers of a unhealthy deal with Tehran are monumental — and even a delay in the negotiations would give the regime time to rearm itself and its proxies, enabling them to renew assaults with larger precision.
A sturdy peace should halt the Iranian nuclear menace for good and terminate its five-decade marketing campaign of subversion and intimidation of its neighbors.
A dishonest broker like Pakistan has no business being at that desk.
Ahmad Sharawi is a senior analysis analyst at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.
