Pakistan Brings Trust to New York

Deputy Prime Minister Ishaq Dar left for New York on Sunday for five days at the U.N. General Assembly, and his calendar shows how far Pakistan’s diplomacy now reaches. Between Sept. 21 and 25 he will accompany Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif, speak at a Security Council briefing on artificial intelligence and chair a meeting of the Economic Cooperation Organization’s Council of Ministers. The foreign office said he will also highlight Pakistan’s efforts for regional and international peace, meet counterparts from several countries and attend the high-level session on pandemic prevention.

The timing invites skepticism. Washington and Tehran have no diplomatic breakthrough in sight, and Houthis are launching more attacks on Saudi Arabia. But the fair test of Pakistan’s mediation is what it achieved when others failed. Pakistan brokered the ceasefire that began April 8, after Field Marshal Asim Munir spent the hours before a deadline set by President Donald Trump on the phone with U.S. officials. Pakistani officials said Trump later extended the truce indefinitely at the personal request of Field Marshal Asim Munir and Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif. On April 11 and 12 Islamabad hosted the highest-level direct engagement between the two governments since 1979, with Vice President JD Vance attending.

The Council on Foreign Relations noted that Pakistan delivered what diplomats from far richer countries could not manage in almost five decades. In mid-June, Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif told the National Assembly that the negotiations came close to collapse on more than one occasion and that Field Marshal Asim Munir kept them alive. On June 17 he signed the memorandum that extended the truce and opened a path toward a lasting settlement.

The memorandum frayed within four weeks. Trump declared the ceasefire over in July and ordered strikes, then reinstated a naval blockade of Iranian ships. Pakistan’s foreign ministry answered that renewed conflict served no one, and Islamabad stayed engaged alongside Qatar and Oman. That is what a mediator does. Blame for a broken truce belongs to the parties who returned to strikes and blockades, not to the country that stayed at the table.

Pakistan can play this role because Tehran says it trusts Islamabad and Washington keeps taking its calls. Iran’s ambassador in Islamabad said in April that Tehran would hold talks in Pakistan and nowhere else because it trusts the country. Pakistan shares a 560-mile border with Iran and signed a mutual defense pact with Saudi Arabia in September 2025, so it understands the fears in both Tehran and Riyadh. Qatar has publicly backed mediation efforts led by Pakistan.

Some Trump administration officials complained in May that Islamabad was relaying a rosier version of Iran’s position than reality supported. A Pakistani official replied that mediation works only when the mediator stays impartial. That answer is correct. A go-between who lectures one side loses that side.

Dar’s other engagements follow the same logic. He will attend meetings on Palestine, including the Global Alliance for the Implementation of the Two-State Solution, and the Organization of Islamic Cooperation Contact Group on Jammu and Kashmir, where he will press Pakistan’s support for Kashmiri self-determination. Pakistan’s positions on both rest on decades of U.N. resolutions, and they share a premise with its Iran diplomacy. Disputes end at negotiating tables, and the people living inside them deserve a voice.

While Dar works the corridors in New York, Pakistan’s interior minister in Tehran is discussing regional developments with Iranian leaders, Arab News reported. Pakistan runs both tracks at once.

Pakistan has not yet secured a lasting deal. Nobody else has either. Leaders in New York this week will deliver plenty of speeches. Dar arrives with something scarcer, the standing to call both Washington and Tehran and get an answer.