No deal came out of Islamabad, and by the time the delegations were airborne, US President Donald Trump had already shifted the argument from the conference room to the sea, ordering a blockade in the Strait of Hormuz after the first direct, high-level US-Iran engagement since the 1979 revolution ended without agreement on the one question that swallowed everything else: Iran’s nuclear programme.
That is the visible outcome. No second-guessing that. Of course, there’s another that needs a harder, closer reading of the fine print. Pakistan did not produce a settlement in 21 hours. Yes, but it did produce something rarer in this neighbourhood, where diplomacy is usually treated as a public relations costume. It turned a ceasefire into a negotiating table, kept two enemies in the same process for nearly a full day, and forced the crisis to reveal its real terms instead of the slogans in which it had been wrapped.
US Vice President J D Vance, who headed the American side, did not pretend a breakthrough had been reached. “We have been at it now for 21 hours, and we have had a number of substantive discussions,” he said. “The bad news is that we have not reached an agreement.” He added that Washington had made clear “what our red lines are” and that the Iranians had “chosen not to accept our terms”. These are not the words of a man fresh from some diplomatic masterpiece. Yet neither are they the words of a man writing off the exercise as futile. They describe what hard negotiations sound like when they are still alive. President Trump, characteristically, said “most points were agreed to” even while insisting that none of those points mattered besides the nuclear issue.
Pakistan’s contribution should be described with precision, because precision is what saves columns like mine from turning into a YouTube rant.
That matters because chatter, both within and nearby the house, has been pitifully small. No dramatic communiqué, no victory parade, and at once the familiar verdict arrived that the whole thing had been overhyped. This is the usual petty agenda-setting that keeps sabotaging any serious understanding in Pakistan.
Considering how the talks covered Iran’s nuclear programme, sanctions relief, frozen assets, economic arrangements and regional security issues, and that they were conducted in multiple formats, including expert-level exchanges and written proposals, it was disheartening to see much of our commentary reduce a strategically loaded event to complaints about access. This says less about the Foreign Office than it does about a media culture that still confuses noise with well-argued commentary.
Nevertheless, Pakistan’s contribution should be described with precision, because precision is what saves columns like mine from turning into a YouTube rant. It did not draft the American position. It did not write Iran’s demands. It could not erase the accumulated poison of sanctions, assassinations, proxy war and ideological hostility in one sitting. What it did was harder and more valuable. It created a setting in which two sides that had spent decades communicating through threats, intermediaries and retaliatory action had to state their demands directly, in the presence of a mediator each believed had enough standing to keep the process intact. The Americans acknowledged that. “Whatever shortcomings in the negotiations were not because of the Pakistanis, who did an amazing job and really tried to help us and the Iranians bridge the gap and get to a deal,” Vance said after the talks.
Outside observers understood the shift as well. Michael Kugelman, one of Washington’s more careful South Asia watchers, said Pakistan’s role had moved “from facilitator and go-between to direct mediator and peace negotiator”, calling it “much more ambitious” and “a massive lift.”
Elizabeth Threlkeld said Pakistan had “very deftly managed to rebuild its relations with President Trump in his second term” and argued that in some ways “that’s already a victory for Pakistan because it succeeded in playing this role”.
Wall Street Journal Columnist Sadanand Dhume acknowledged, ” I genuinely don’t understand how any reasonable person can interpret the failure of the U.S. and Iran to reach a deal in Islamabad as a failure of Pakistani diplomacy…Pakistan has emerged, at least for now, as a prominent diplomatic actor on the world stage, and as the recipient of much international goodwill.”
Even the BBC’s Ione Wells, standing outside the White House, said, “We must say Pakistan did it,” adding that bringing Iran and the US to talks had once been called impossible.
The real hinge in the story, though, lies beyond the applause. Within hours of the talks ending, Trump ordered the US Navy to begin “BLOCKADING” ships trying to enter or leave the Strait of Hormuz, to interdict vessels said to have paid “a toll to Iran”, and to begin destroying what he described as Iranian mines in the waterway. Iran’s Revolutionary Guards replied that any military vessels approaching Hormuz would be treated as a violation of the ceasefire.
Hormuz is not some decorative strip of water on a newsroom map. The US Energy Information Administration says around 20 million barrels a day of crude oil and petroleum products moved through the strait in 2024, roughly a fifth of global petroleum liquids consumption. A crisis there ricochets through shipping, insurance, fuel prices, inflation and growth. History helps here, though only if used soberly. Pakistan has done its best diplomatic work when it understood that discretion is not weakness. The old habit in this country is to either romanticise such moments into a national myth or diminish them because they do not yield instant spectacle. Both instincts are juvenile. The Islamabad talks sit somewhere more interesting. They show a Pakistani state that, after years of drift and self-absorption, is again capable of making itself relevant in a crisis not by speechmaking but by utility, by providing a venue, a channel, a degree of trust, and enough persistence to turn a ceasefire into direct engagement. The reason the result remains unfinished is not Pakistani incompetence. It is that the dispute itself is layered with nuclear suspicion, regional rivalry, domestic political compulsions and external spoilers powerful enough to sink easier processes than this one.
And the process is not dead. Senior officials in Islamabad, speaking on background, say the channel remains active, and preparations are underway for another round of engagement, with some going as far as to indicate that Pakistan could again host both delegations if the ceasefire holds long enough to create space for renewed talks. Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif noted that “full effort” was still being made to resolve the conflict while China’s foreign minister told Ishaq Dar that the ceasefire was “very fragile”, that the priority was to preserve the “hard-won momentum”, and that Beijing would be pleased to see Pakistan playing a greater role. Those are not the sounds of a door slamming shut. They are the sounds of a room being kept ready. Pakistan’s wiser course now is the one it has so far mostly followed: say less, host if asked, hold the channel, protect confidentiality and resist the temptation to turn a difficult diplomatic opening into a chest-thumping domestic sales pitch.
The writer is OpEd Editor (Daily Times) and can be reached at durenayab786 @gmail.com. She tweets @DureAkram.