Foreign Minister Ishaq Dar’s meeting with his Iranian counterpart Abbas Araghchi in Kyrgyzstan seems to have come as the geography of the Iran crisis was changing again. The last few days have seen a terrifying exchange of strikes between the two camps as Washington hit Iranian military facilities along the country’s southern coast and Iran answered with attacks on US bases in Gulf states. In that atmosphere, the deputy prime minister’s appeal to build on the Islamabad MoU will go down in history books as another much-needed attempt to keep a political wire connected while the military men on both sides were cutting through every safeguard around it.
The urgency is clearer at sea. Transit through Hormuz has already become uncertain enough to depress tanker movement through the strait. Now the Houthis’ claimed attacks on two Saudi tankers near Bab al-Mandeb threaten to draw the Red Sea into the same war. A conflict that began with air strikes, missile launches and threats to nuclear facilities is acquiring a maritime economy of its own.
That should alarm more than oil traders. Hormuz carries roughly a fifth of the world’s seaborne oil traffic and a major share of liquefied natural gas. Meanwhile, Bab al-Mandeb is the southern gate to the Red Sea and the Suez Canal, a route that accounts for around 12 per cent of the global trade. Cargoes unable to move through Hormuz will lose the Gulf’s direct outlet and ships unwilling to use Bab al-Mandeb face the long journey around Africa, adding fuel costs, insurance premiums and days at sea. Pakistan, already carrying the burden of imported fuel and a fragile external account, has no reason to regard this as someone else’s naval quarrel.
The danger increasingly lies in the political logic now taking hold. Washington’s answer to attacks on shipping is increasingly framed in terms of punitive strikes. Standing on the other end of the spectrum, Tehran sees pressure on sea lanes and regional bases as leverage against an adversary with far greater air power. The Houthis are using the Red Sea to demonstrate that Yemen can no longer be kept outside the regional equation. Every party believes it is raising the cost for the other side. The bill, however, is being sent to the world economy.
This is where the Islamabad MoU comes back into view. Its value was never in the grand language that gathers around mediation after a breakthrough. Its value lies in preserving contact when neither Washington nor Tehran can afford to appear accommodating.
Pakistan cannot guarantee peace in the Gulf, nor has it ever advertised itself as a custodian of an agreement whose most delicate provisions remain outside public view. It can, however, use the access it has earned to press a narrower and more immediate purpose of preventing international waterways from becoming reciprocal hostages in a war already running beyond its original calculations. *