Views from The Thursday Times' editorial desk.
What does it take to go from an unanswered White House phone call to a UN Security Council seat in two years? Ask Pakistan. The Makkah Defence Pact. US-Iran mediation. An invite from Damascus. India lost Washington's favor in the same stretch.
Imran Khan’s sister says he is fit, with normal blood pressure and improved eyesight. Official records document specialist treatment and family access. Yet the international narrative remains one of isolation and medical crisis. The record versus the rhetoric.
Countries do not enter mutual defence commitments with partners whose reliability they doubt, because the cost of misjudging that is measured in soldiers. Riyadh and Ankara have decided Pakistan is a state whose word will hold when it is expensive to hold it.
A Chief Justice called unemployed youth cockroaches. An exam sat by 22 lakh students was leaked, and some of them killed themselves. India's government waited, then delegitimised, then used force, then blamed Pakistan. Each step has failed.
Pakistan may have disagreements with Iran, and Iran may have disappointed Pakistan by leaning too warmly towards India at times. But neighbours who share borders must also share funerals.
Pakistan’s role at the Lake Lucerne Summit marked a rare diplomatic success, placing Islamabad alongside Qatar as a mediator in the US-Iran process. Shehbaz Sharif gave the effort political direction, while Field Marshal Asim Munir added security credibility.
From crisis, isolation and doubt, Pakistan has stepped into the diplomatic centre of gravity. If the US-Iran peace framework holds, Islamabad will not merely have brokered a deal. It will have reminded the world that nations are not condemned to the reputations others write for them.
Pakistan’s role in de-escalation does not amount to acceptance of normalisation with Israel. Islamabad’s Palestine policy remains rooted in statehood, Al-Quds, and pre-1967 borders, not the politics of the Iran file.
Senior RSS and military remarks in India have reopened the question of dialogue with Pakistan, exposing the limits of New Delhi’s hardline public posture. At the same time, Islamabad is trying to show that its relevance now extends beyond India, through crisis diplomacy involving Iran, the US, the Gulf, China and multilateral finance.
Pakistan’s growing diplomatic relevance has triggered a sharper narrative war, with foreign criticism, hostile media framing and domestic security incidents being used to cast Islamabad as unstable just as it re-enters the centre of regional diplomacy.
