[[link removed]]

FROM MUTUAL SUSPICION TO POLITICAL EMBRACE: HOW THE U.S. LEARNED TO
STOP WORRYING AND LOVE PAKISTAN  
[[link removed]]


 

Waqas Ahmed, Murtaza Hussain, Ryan Grim
May 17, 2026
Drop Site News
[[link removed]]


*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

_ Pakistan may have appeared as an unexpected mediator in the
negotiations to end the Iran war. But the country, taken over by a
military regime after the ouster of populist PM Imran Khan, has
recently been making a major play on the world stage. _

U.S. Vice President JD Vance shakes hands with Pakistan’s Prime
Minister Shehbaz Sharif during their meeting on April 11, 2026 at
Islamabad, Pakistan. , Photo by Jacquelyn Martin - Pool/Getty Images.

 

Yesterday, Pakistan’s Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif told the Sunday
Times that Pakistan serving as a mediator in the U.S.-Iran war is
“one of the shining moments in our history.”

“We are in seventh heaven and on cloud nine and it’s
intoxicating,” the former Pakistani ambassador to the U.S. Masood
Khan concurred
[[link removed]].
“I’ve had a long diplomatic career and I have never seen Pakistan
on such a high pedestal.”

“When I went to Washington as ambassador in 2022, it was an uphill
task,” he continued. “Yet now Pakistan is playing the role the UN
should have been—it’s a very delicate task and we are doing it
well.”

For some, Pakistan may have appeared as an unexpected mediator in the
negotiations to end the Iran war. But the country, taken over by a
military regime after the ouster of populist PM Imran Khan, has
recently been making a major play on the world stage.

Drop Site has been a lone voice in producing independent
investigations on Pakistan—a country of over 200 million people with
nuclear weapons and without freedom of the press. We’re able to do
so because—as a reader-funded independent news outlet—we operate
free from the influence of governments and corporate backers.

This is essential to our mission: to report on what matters most,
beholden only to the truth. In that spirit, we made a commitment to
ensure that our journalism is free for everyone, not locked behind a
paywall. But that means we rely on the voluntary support of our
community of readers. Please consider making a tax-deductible donation
to support our work today.

SUPPORT DROP SITE TODAY [[link removed]]

On the afternoon of Friday, April 24, as markets in the United States
were closing for the weekend, the Trump administration saw some
welcome news: Axios published a story indicating that Iranian Foreign
Minister Abbas Araghchi was headed to Islamabad, with the potential to
restart the failed talks with the U.S. to end the war. If all went
well, Araghchi would meet that Monday with U.S. envoy Steve Witkoff
and Donald Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner. “A trilateral
meeting with the U.S. will be assessed after our meeting with
Araghchi,” a source described as a “Pakistani official” told
Axios’s Barak Ravid.

At the same time, Pakistan’s Inter-Services Public Relations (ISPR),
the media arm of Pakistan’s ruling military, sent out a private
message on WhatsApp to reporters. The message
[[link removed]], the ISPR
told reporters, was “Attributable to Government
Sources”—obscuring the military’s role—and informed reporters
of Araghchi’s impending visit. “Following important discussions
with the Pakistani mediation team, a second round of Islamabad peace
talks between the United States and Iran is expected, government
sources say,” the ISPR suggested. “A U.S. logistics and security
team is already present in Islamabad to facilitate the negotiation
process.”

The claim flew around the world and stocks popped at the close, as
reporters copied the ISPR message and pasted it on their Twitter
accounts. Pakistani mediators basked in adulation from the Western
press, which marveled at the Phoenix-like rise of the military-run
government, now a central player on the world stage.

On the afternoon of Friday, April 24, as markets in the United States
were closing for the weekend, the Trump administration saw some
welcome news: Axios published a story indicating that Iranian Foreign
Minister Abbas Araghchi was headed to Islamabad, with the potential to
restart the failed talks with the U.S. to end the war. If all went
well, Araghchi would meet that Monday with U.S. envoy Steve Witkoff
and Donald Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner. “A trilateral
meeting with the U.S. will be assessed after our meeting with
Araghchi,” a source described as a “Pakistani official” told
Axios’s Barak Ravid.

At the same time, Pakistan’s Inter-Services Public Relations (ISPR),
the media arm of Pakistan’s ruling military, sent out a private
message on WhatsApp to reporters. The message
[[link removed]], the ISPR
told reporters, was “Attributable to Government
Sources”—obscuring the military’s role—and informed reporters
of Araghchi’s impending visit. “Following important discussions
with the Pakistani mediation team, a second round of Islamabad peace
talks between the United States and Iran is expected, government
sources say,” the ISPR suggested. “A U.S. logistics and security
team is already present in Islamabad to facilitate the negotiation
process.”

The claim flew around the world and stocks popped at the close, as
reporters copied the ISPR message and pasted it on their Twitter
accounts. Pakistani mediators basked in adulation from the Western
press, which marveled at the Phoenix-like rise of the military-run
government, now a central player on the world stage.

And yet, surprising nobody who had been following the situation
closely, the story quickly unraveled. As Drop Site reported
[[link removed]]
in real time, Araghchi was not going to Islamabad to re-open talks and
would most certainly not be meeting with Witkoff and Kushner. Trump
called off their trip, saying the Iranians could phone them if they
wanted.

By Sunday, Ebrahim Rezaei, an Iranian national security spokesperson,
had seen enough. “Pakistan is a good friend and neighbor of ours,
but it is not a suitable intermediary for negotiations and lacks the
necessary credibility for mediation,” Rezaei said on Twitter.
“They always take Trump’s interests into account and do not say a
word against the Americans’ wishes.”

Listing a litany of instances where Pakistan had simply deferred to
Trump and overlooked his violation of agreements, he added, “A
mediator must be impartial, not always leaning to one side.”

Pakistan has continued assisting the talks, including by lending an
official plane to Araghchi for a short flight to Oman for a brief
diplomatic tour last month. But the very mercenary nature of the
regime, which allowed it to position itself so effectively as a tool
for American interests, also diminishes its value in the role as
peacemaker. At the same time, other parties, including Oman, Russia,
China, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey have also begun to try their hands at
shaping the diplomatic outcome of the war.

How Pakistan got to this point is a story of steady American pressure
applied in a variety of ways and a testament to the Pakistan
military’s uncanny survival instincts. After engineering former
prime minister Imran Khan’s removal in 2022, blatantly rigging a
national election in 2024, and continuing to govern in the face of
sustained public opposition, the generals have only tightened their
hold at home and their standing in Washington.

Leaked documents obtained by Drop Site News, as well as interviews
with former civilian and military officials, trace the sequence of
events that shaped the U.S.-Pakistan relationship over the past five
years and brought Washington and Islamabad from mutual suspicion into
a political embrace. This budding relationship, despite bearing hopes
to reshape the region, may yet be brought down by the shaky foundation
on which it was built.

To hear the recent laudatory profiles of Pakistan tell it,
Pakistan’s diplomatic position is a product of effective lobbying by
the Pakistani government in D.C. But the true story has been much
longer in the making.

BURNS IN ISLAMABAD

 
In June 2021, CIA Director William J. Burns flew
[[link removed]] to Islamabad to meet with
then-Prime Minister Imran Khan. He waited a full day to see Khan,
according to reports from the time. But the meeting never happened.
Khan’s office informed Burns by phone that the prime minister,
citing protocol, would only take calls from his counterparts. His
counterpart was President Joe Biden, who, since taking office that
January, had declined [[link removed]] repeated
requests for a direct call.

Biden’s refusal to meet Khan personally marked a stinging reversal
from the previous administration. In July 2019, Khan had been invited
for a brief meeting in the White House during the Trump administration
that wound up lasting longer than 90 minutes. Trump and Khan enjoyed a
warm relationship and had much in common: They were both celebrities
in the ‘80s and ‘90s who became populist politicians around the
same time. They met again in September 2019 on the sidelines of the
United Nations General Assembly meetings and again in January 2020 in
the White House.

For the Biden administration, Khan was merely the Donald Trump of
Pakistan. Burns had come to secure Pakistani territory for U.S. drone
bases to use against targets in Afghanistan after the planned American
withdrawal. He left with neither the bases nor an audience with the
prime minister. If there was any confusion on the matter, Khan cleared
it up later that month in an interview with Axios’s co-founder
Jonathan Swan. “Absolutely not. There is no way we are going to
allow any bases, any sort of action from Pakistani territory into
Afghanistan. Absolutely not,” he said. Within weeks, Kabul fell to
the Taliban, and the U.S. evacuation descended into chaos that damaged
the Biden administration’s standing at home and abroad.

Donald Trump and Imran Khan meet in the Oval Office at the White House
on July 22, 2019 in Washington, DC. Photo by Mark Wilson/Getty Images.

In the months prior, Khan’s government had helped broker the final
agreement between the Taliban and the Trump administration. Even so,
ties between Washington and Islamabad were already deeply frayed. For
two decades, U.S. officials had accused Pakistan of sheltering the
Taliban while accepting billions of dollars in American aid as a
nominal ally. Pakistan’s military faced further scrutiny after U.S.
Navy SEALs killed Osama bin Laden in 2011 in Abbottabad, a garrison
town home to Pakistan’s military academy, a raid conducted without
Islamabad’s knowledge. By the early 2020s, the prevailing view in
U.S. policy circles was that Washington should leave Afghanistan and
cut Islamabad loose.

The dismissal of Burns’s request and the collapse of Kabul set off a
chain reaction. Leaked documents reviewed by Drop Site News
[[link removed]]
show that in the same period, Saudi Arabia was pressing Pakistan for a
mutual defense pact—an overture Khan’s government was also
rebuffing, according to the documents. In principle, Khan’s
government was drawing diplomatic red lines with both Washington and
the Gulf Cooperation Council, but the Pakistani military concluded he
was isolating the country.

In July 2021, without the prime minister’s knowledge, the military
quietly retained
[[link removed]]
a former CIA Islamabad station chief as a lobbyist in Washington, an
early sign that Pakistan’s generals were beginning to move
independently of their own elected government.

READ MORE: LEAKED DOCUMENTS REVEAL DETAILS OF THE SECRET SAUDI
ARABIA–PAKISTAN MUTUAL DEFENSE PACT
[[link removed]]

ALL WILL BE FORGIVEN

In February 2022, Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine. Driving back Russia
became the Biden administration’s overriding foreign policy priority
almost overnight. U.S. diplomats pressed capitals across the world to
pick a side. As the world began to fracture over the conflict,
Pakistan unexpectedly found itself in the center of the maelstrom.

On February 24, the day Russian forces crossed into Ukraine, Imran
Khan was in Moscow for a long-scheduled meeting with President Putin.
Days before that fateful meeting, Jake Sullivan, national security
advisor to Biden, had called [[link removed]] his
Pakistani counterpart, Moeed Yusuf, urging him to persuade Khan to
cancel the trip. The details of that call, later leaked to Drop Site,
show Sullivan warning against the visit and pressing Islamabad to side
clearly with the U.S. in the Ukraine war. Khan ignored the warning.

Photographs of Putin and Khan shaking hands went viral on social media
the same day the news of the invasion hit the timelines. Pakistani
officials said the trip had been planned for months and could not be
cancelled. Yet the incident was not viewed innocently in Washington.

Days later, Pakistan abstained from a United Nations General Assembly
resolution condemning the invasion, joining China, India, and much of
the Global South. U.S. diplomats, already furious over the Moscow
visit and Khan’s refusal to clearly align with Washington, began
telling Pakistani interlocutors privately that the relationship could
not continue on its existing terms.

On March 7, 2022, Pakistan’s ambassador in Washington, Asad Majeed
Khan, met with Donald Lu, the U.S. assistant secretary of state for
South and Central Asian affairs. That conversation, documented in a
classified diplomatic cable that would later be leaked, became the
inflection point of the U.S.-Pakistan relationship. According to the
cable, Lu told the ambassador that Washington’s grievances with
Khan’s government could be set aside, “all will be forgiven,” in
the phrase the Pakistani ambassador would later cite, if Khan were
removed from office through a no-confidence vote.

(The authors of this article previously published the contents of the
cable, known as a cypher in Pakistan, but had withheld the memo itself
for source protection reasons. The cypher can now be published in
full, so it can be a part of the historical record. IT IS NOW
AVAILABLE HERE
[[link removed]].)

Khan was removed on April 9, 2022, in a no-confidence vote backed by
[[link removed]]
Pakistan’s military. His party, Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf, was
subsequently outlawed, stripped of its electoral symbol ahead of the
2024 general election, and barred from fielding candidates under its
own banner. Members who won seats as independents were denied
certification.

Khan and his wife, Bushra Bibi, were jailed on a series of corruption,
contempt, and national security charges. Both remain in prison to this
day, Khan under solitary confinement since last year.

Under the new government, installed with the military’s backing,
Islamabad began delivering to Washington what it had refused to
deliver under Khan. Within months, Pakistan emerged as a quiet but
significant supplier of artillery shells and other munitions to
Ukraine.

Leaked documents showed
[[link removed]] the
weapons were routed through U.S. defense contractors and third-country
intermediaries, easing shortages in Ukrainian stockpiles during the
first year of the war. Former U.S. and Pakistani officials stated at
the time that American support for Pakistan’s next International
Monetary Fund program was explicitly linked to the continuation of the
weapons pipeline. In July 2023, the IMF approved a $3 billion standby
arrangement for Pakistan.

In February 2024, both the European Union and United States looked
away as the military massively rigged elections and installed a
suitable government in Islamabad.

During the U.S. Presidential elections the same year, the Pakistani
diaspora in the United States overwhelmingly supported the Trump
campaign. The reason, cited almost unanimously, was the Biden
administration’s support for the military junta in Pakistan. Many
prominent Pakistani-Americans and groups such as PAKPAC declared their
support for the Republican campaign due to this.

When Trump took office in January 2025, the question of what to do
about Pakistan became an early flashpoint inside his administration.
Drop Site News reported at the time that the new State Department,
under Secretary Marco Rubio, clashed
[[link removed]]
with the Pentagon over the direction of U.S. policy toward Islamabad,
a dispute that would shape everything that followed.

The Pentagon and CIA finally won and took over the relationship.

The Republican promises to the Pakistani diaspora were used by the
Trump administration to scare the Pakistani government into
submission. The Pakistani government also proceeded to spend hundreds
of thousands of dollars in public relations spending
[[link removed]] during this period according to
publicly available FARA filings.

THE NUCLEAR STATE

 
On April 9, 2022, the day Khan’s government was toppled, Pakistan
conducted [[link removed]] a missile
test. The missile was the Shaheen III, Pakistan’s longest range
ballistic missile with a range of almost 3,000 kilometers. While
Pakistan’s missile program has been focused on India, the test was
essentially a validation that Islamabad’s missiles also had the
capacity to reach Israel. That fact reflected a longstanding anxiety
in Washington.

After Khan was removed by General Qamar Javed Bajwa, Pakistan’s army
chief at the time, Bajwa travelled to D.C. in October 2022 in an
effort to reset ties. During the visit, which also marked his last
month in office, Bajwa met with top Biden officials, including Defense
Secretary Lloyd Austin and national security adviser Jake Sullivan. In
those talks, he assured
[[link removed]]
the U.S. that Pakistan would limit the ranges of its missiles to just
fall short of Israel. Seeking to curry even more favor, Bajwa also
assured his American interlocutors that Pakistan wanted to rein in its
military, limit its nuclear program, and move away from China.

In October 2022, soon after General Bajwa’s return to Pakistan,
Bajwa called the head of the Strategic Plan Division (SPD), the
military division overseeing Pakistan’s nuclear weapons. According
to a source aware of the details of the conversation, General Bajwa
ordered the head of SPD to allow an American delegation to visit and
inspect some sensitive nuclear sites in the country. In the hierarchy
of Pakistan’s nuclear command, the head of SPD reports directly to
the Joint Chief of Staff Committee (JCSC), who in turn reports to the
prime minister, not to the army chief.

Using this excuse, the SPD head refused General Bajwa at the time,
according to sources, showing that the military chief was not
completely in charge of the country’s nukes. Later the same month
President Biden gave a statement
[[link removed]]
claiming that, “Pakistan may be one of the most dangerous nations in
the world” because the country has “nuclear weapons without any
cohesion.”

The statement, coming seemingly out of nowhere, stunned many
observers. But according to sources privy to the internal
communications over the matter, Biden’s statement was related to
Bajwa’s inability to provide American inspectors access to
Pakistan’s sensitive nuclear sites.

Bajwa stepped down a month later, putting General Asim Munir in charge
in November 2022. In 2025, after three tumultuous years heading the
military-led government, Munir promoted himself to the rank of Field
Marshall, created a new office of Chief of Defence Forces’ for
himself, and abolished the role of JCSC through a constitutional
amendment. The series of bureaucratic maneuvers—unprecedented in
Pakistani history—also had the effect of placing Munir personally in
charge of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons. For the first time, the checks
and balances surrounding Pakistan’s nuclear command had been unified
under a single person: the country’s staunchly pro-U.S. army chief.

A checkpoint next to large screen displaying Pakistan’s Army Chief
and Field Marshal Syed Asim Munir in Islamabad on April 18, 2026.
Photo by Aamir QURESHI / AFP via Getty Images.

ASIM MUNIR’S SECOND ACT

 
To Trump, Asim Munir is “my favorite Field Marshal.” He relishes
the title, musing regularly about the delightfulness of the moniker.
It was never a given that Munir would wind up in such an exalted
position.

In April 2019, while Munir was director general of the ISI, the
country’s powerful spy service, he traveled with then-Prime Minister
Khan to Tehran for discussions with Iranian officials as well as
officials with the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps. Munir, according
to people close to Khan, battled with the Iranians over the
long-simmering insurgency in the Baloch region that is split by the
Iran-Pakistan border.

According to a former PTI official, Munir “used undiplomatic
language in Iran and deviated from the strategy the Pakistani
government had discussed internally prior to the trip,” which is
characteristic of Munir’s style. A source who served in Khan’s
inner circle confirmed the account to Drop Site. Pakistan and Iran
cooperating [[link removed]] to stamp out
the insurgency in the Baloch region would be a step toward closer
relations and run contrary to Washington’s efforts to isolate Iran.
Munir, whether on orders from the U.S. or by instinct, by disrupting
that relationship, was doing a strong favor for the Americans.

Iranian leadership complained to Khan about Munir’s outburst and in
June 2019, Khan sacked Munir over the incident, sources with knowledge
of his decision making said. At eight months, it was a remarkably
short tenure atop the ISI. When Bajwa initially put forward a list of
successors for the position of Army chief, Munir wasn’t on it.

Khan later alleged that Munir traveled to London after his firing and
met with Nawaz Sharif—the former Pakistani Prime Minister who, by
late 2019, was living in self-imposed exile in London after being
permitted to leave Pakistan for medical treatment in the middle of a
corruption sentence. According to Khan, that meeting marked the
beginning of what he would later, from prison, call “the London
Plan,” an alleged understanding between Munir, Sharif, and members
of Pakistan’s senior judiciary under which Munir would be elevated
to army chief in exchange for the political and judicial dismantling
of Khan’s government and his party.

Munir was appointed army chief on November 24, 2022, in a process that
was widely reported to have involved extensive consultations
[[link removed]]
with Nawaz Sharif.

Within months of the appointment, Khan was arrested and convicted in a
series of corruption, contempt, and national security cases, which
have repeatedly fallen apart under scrutiny, only to be replaced with
new charges.

Sharif returned to Pakistan in October 2023; the bulk of his
outstanding convictions were vacated within weeks. By February 2024,
his younger brother, Shehbaz Sharif, was again prime minister, and
Munir was the most powerful figure in the country. Khan remains in
prison and this month three Islamabad High Court judges, Mohsin Akhtar
Kayani, Babar Sattar, and Saman Rafat Imtiaz, were transferred out of
the capital and into provincial high courts in Lahore, Peshawar, and
Karachi, scattering the bench that had been hearing his appeals.

STOPPING CHINA

 
For most of the past decade, Pakistan’s relationship with China
stood as the one constant in its foreign policy. The China-Pakistan
Economic Corridor, launched in 2015 as the flagship of Beijing’s
Belt and Road Initiative, brought tens of billions of dollars in
highways, power plants and port infrastructure to a country that had
struggled to attract foreign investment. Senior officials in Islamabad
described the relationship in language reserved for no other partner,
calling it “all-weather,” and “deeper than the deepest sea.”

Under Munir, that relationship has slowed almost to a halt.

Of the roughly 90 projects originally envisioned under CPEC, only 38
have been completed. Twenty-three remain under construction. About a
third have not been started. The last major project to be delivered,
the Gwadar East Bay Expressway, was finished in 2022. No flagship
project has been added to the pipeline since. ML-1, the upgrade of
Pakistan’s main north-south rail line and once the centerpiece of
CPEC’s planned second phase, has been deferred repeatedly.

Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif left Beijing empty-handed after a 2024
visit intended to secure new funding. Pakistan’s unpaid dues to
Chinese power producers have ballooned into a recurring source of
friction. Beijing’s ambassador in Islamabad, Jiang Zaidong, took the
unusual step of using a public seminar in 2024 to accuse the Pakistani
state of failing to protect Chinese workers, 21 of whom have been
killed in attacks since CPEC’s launch.

The relationship was even colder behind the scenes. In 2024, Drop Site
News reported that Pakistan had given Beijing private assurances it
would permit China to convert the deep-water port at Gwadar into a
permanent Chinese military facility, a longstanding ambition by
Beijing that Pakistan had declined for more than a decade.

According to classified Pakistani military documents reviewed by Drop
Site News, Pakistani negotiators presented Beijing with a list of
demands in exchange for that base. They asked China to indemnify
Pakistan against any U.S. political, economic or diplomatic
retaliation for hosting the facility. They also asked China to provide
modernization assistance to keep Pakistan’s military and
intelligence capabilities competitive with India. Most
consequentially, they asked Beijing to provide Pakistan with a
sea-based nuclear second-strike
[[link removed]]
capability, the most sensitive element of any nuclear power’s
deterrent, and a capability Pakistan has spent two decades trying to
develop on its own.

China refused. According to sources with knowledge of the talks,
Beijing concluded that the second-strike request would amount to
direct Chinese participation in nuclear proliferation in South Asia,
and therefore would violate Beijing’s own nonproliferation
commitments and expose China to international consequences
disproportionate to the strategic value of the Gwadar facility. The
Chinese side described the demand as unreasonable, and the
negotiations ended on a bitter note.

READ MORE: PAKISTAN PROMISED CHINA A NEW MILITARIZED NAVAL BASE,
LEAKED DOCUMENTS REVEAL
[[link removed]]

In an August 2025 interview, Munir told a journalist, “We will not
sacrifice one friend for the other,” referring to Pakistan’s
relationship with Washington and Beijing. However, in an effort to
realign itself, Pakistani military leadership has ended up doing just
that. CPEC’s second phase, which would have deepened Pakistan’s
economic dependence on Beijing, was intentionally allowed to atrophy,
and Chinese requests for permanent security arrangements covering its
workers, a long-running Beijing demand that would have placed Chinese
personnel on Pakistani soil under Chinese command, were quietly
deflected. These moves had more geopolitical significance for
Washington than Pakistan’s participation in the Trump family’s
crypto schemes, and did more to make Munir Trump’s “favorite field
marshal.”

WEB OF ALLIANCES

In September 2025, Pakistan signed a mutual defense pact with Saudi
Arabia
[[link removed]]
committing each country to come to the other’s aid in the event of
war, an agreement Khan’s government had refused to sign three years
earlier. Throughout the same period, Pakistan’s new military-led
government, working in close coordination with the Pentagon, set about
cultivating the new Trump administration.

When the Trump family moved into cryptocurrency
[[link removed]],
Islamabad followed, establishing the Pakistan Crypto Council. Within
weeks of the body’s creation, the leadership of World Liberty
Financial, the decentralized finance platform launched in September
2024, and majority owned by the Trump family, landed in Islamabad. The
April 26 delegation was led by Zach Witkoff
[[link removed]], the
chief executive of World Liberty and son of Steve Witkoff, and
included co-founders Zak Folkman and Chase Herro. By the end of the
visit, Finance Minister Muhammad Aurangzeb, in presence of Field
Marshal Asim Munir, had signed a memorandum committing Pakistan to
route a share of its $36 billion in annual remittances through the
Trump-family-owned firm’s USD1 stablecoin.

When concerns about U.S. dependence on Chinese rare earth mineral
supply chains became a recurring theme in administration messaging,
Pakistan announced a sweeping rare earths
[[link removed]]
agreement with U.S. partners. The September 2025 deal, signed by the
military-run Frontier Works Organization and a Missouri-based firm
called U.S. Strategic Metals, promised $500 million in American
investment in exchange for Pakistani antimony, copper, tungsten, and
rare earth elements. Beyond a symbolic first consignment dispatched a
few weeks later, no commercial-scale shipments have moved under the
deal in the months since.

And when the Trump administration sought a Muslim-majority country to
commit troops to its proposed international stabilization force in
Gaza, the Pakistani military volunteered.

Throughout this Trump presidency, Pakistan has found a way to stay
relevant and in the headlines, promising much but delivering little.

Despite being ceaselessly hyped by Islamabad, the current efforts at
mediating an end to the war seem to have reached a familiar impasse.
While Munir initially touted the idea of signing an “Islamabad
Accord” that would not only put an end to the current fighting but
lead to a new era of peace between Iran and the U.S. At present those
efforts appear to have stalled. While Pakistan officially retains its
role as a mediator, the prospects of a negotiated deal brokered by
Islamabad appear more remote than they did one month prior.

Meanwhile, there is increasing pressure on President Trump from
pro-Israel voices in the United States to drop Pakistan as a mediator
in the Iran talks and reassess Islamabad’s growing political and
military proximity to the administration.

Following a report by CBS News, newly purchased by pro-Israel mogul
David Ellison, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) questioned Pakistan’s
legitimacy as a mediator and accused it of “double-dealing” by
allegedly providing safe harbor to an Iranian jet. Pakistan insists
that the plane was part of the Iranian delegation, which stayed in
Pakistan a few extra days in anticipation of the talks. But the denial
did not stop Graham from pressing War Secretary Pete Hegseth on the
matter at a Senate Appropriations Committee hearing on Tuesday;
Hegseth declined to respond.

Trump was not so evasive. When the same question was put to him by a
reporter later that day, he replied, “They’re great. I think the
Pakistanis have been great. The field marshal and the prime minister
of Pakistan have been absolutely great.”

WAQĀS AHMED is the author of the internationally acclaimed book The
Polymath (Wiley 2019) and founder of the DaVinci Network. He has been
Visiting Scholar at the University of Cambridge and Visiting Fellow at
the Open University Business School, with current research interests
including comparative theology, non-Western art, cognitive flexibility
and interdisciplinary leadership. His work generally spans art,
science and international affairs and he has edited several volumes
for international organisations such as UNESCO and the Commonwealth.
He holds a BSc in Economics (SOAS) and postgraduate degrees in
International Relations (LSE) and Neuroscience (King's College
London). Outside of academia, Waqās has been a diplomatic journalist,
charity director and entrepreneur.

MURTAZA HUSSAIN is a journalist. His website is a clearinghouse for
the interesting things that he has come across or thought about
outside the course of his work and some of his own reporting.

RYAN W. GRIM is an American author and journalist. Grim was
Washington, D.C., bureau chief for HuffPost and formerly the
Washington, D.C., bureau chief for The Intercept. In July 2024, Grim
and The Intercept's co-founder Jeremy Scahill left The Intercept to
co-found Drop Site News. He is also Co-Host of Breaking Points, author
of We’ve Got People, The Squad, and This Is Your Country On Drugs.

SUPPORT DROP SITE NEWS [[link removed]]
  SUBSCRIBE TO DROP SITE NEWS
[[link removed]]

* Pakistan
[[link removed]]
* United States
[[link removed]]
* Donald Trump
[[link removed]]
* Iran
[[link removed]]
* Israel
[[link removed]]
* China
[[link removed]]
* Saudi Arabia
[[link removed]]
* cryptocurrency
[[link removed]]
* rare earth minerals
[[link removed]]

*
[[link removed]]
*
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[[link removed]]

 

 

 

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