Pakistan finally has leverage. Can it actually use it?

A different kind of brokering than 1971

The episode opens with Muzamil framing the moment carefully. It is the day the Islamabad accord talks begin. Delegations are arriving, the Iranians are rumoured to be hesitating, and every major front page in the world is pointing at one city in Pakistan. Muzamil has spent the past several episodes in English, partly because international listeners had been writing in to say Pakistani thought leaders were hard to access. This conversation, he says, is the one he most wanted to put in front of that audience.

He sets the historical frame himself before handing it to his guest. Pakistan smuggled Henry Kissinger into China in 1971, played a proxy role in the Afghan jihad of the 1980s, was the most important non-NATO ally during the war on terror, and helped extract people during the 2021 American exit from Afghanistan. Each time the country mattered intensely, and each time, within a year or two, it did not.

Ali Khizar agrees that the pattern is real, but insists this moment is structurally different. “We did pure broking in 1971,” he says. “We planted the tree, but we never got to sit in its shade.” The reason, in his reading, was institutional. Pakistan never built the economic depth or the institutional development to convert that diplomatic moment into anything durable. What is different now, he argues, is that the conversation is no longer hidden. “For the first time in our lifetime, global analysts were talking about us being at the verge of world war three. I have never heard that before — not even in the Cold War.” If Pakistan is genuinely the country slowing that down, the visibility itself is the leverage.

The May engagement was the re-imaging

Ali Khizar traces the shift further back than the current week. The first surprise, he says, was a January 2025 Congressional speech where Donald Trump thanked a single country by name — Pakistan — at a moment when Pakistani commentators had been bracing for the opposite. The credit, by his reading, belonged to Pakistan’s ISI chief, Asim Malik, for quietly bridging the American and Iranian sides.

The second moment was the air engagement with India in May. Ali Khizar does not bother to be cute about it. India launched strikes claiming to hit terrorist infrastructure. Pakistan, depending on whose count one trusts, brought down five to ten Indian aircraft. He wrote an article at the time whose closing line he still remembers: this may be the chance for Pakistan to rise from the ashes. What the engagement actually proved, he argues, was the quality of the China-built air defence ecosystem Pakistan had been investing in for years. “It is better than the Rafale and the Western-Indian partnership,” he says. “That was a very big pain point. And from there, the re-imaging of Pakistan began.”

By the time the Islamabad talks were called, the groundwork was already laid. Pakistan had a defence pact with Saudi Arabia, a complicated but functional channel into Iran, an iron-clad relationship with China, and a fiscal dependence on the IMF that meant it could not afford to alienate Washington. Threading those four needles is what made Pakistan useful. “Pakistan had the resources to respond — and very few countries have that option.”

What middle power actually means

Muzamil pulls the conversation toward the term that has started showing up everywhere in the past month. He notes that Middle East is being replaced by West Asia in serious analyst writing, and middle power is the parallel term being used about Pakistan. He asks Ali Khizar to define it cleanly.

Ali Khizar splits it into two domains. The first is economic power. The second is security power, and he is blunt that in the world that is emerging — one where the post-1990 American single-superpower era is visibly ending — the security domain is where the weight is shifting. “For thirty years, America said something and the world did it. That is changing. America had to put its hands up after one month in this war.” He stops short of declaring American defeat. America, he says, is still the single biggest power and will remain so. But the control it used to project is gone.

Pakistan’s security credibility, in his reading, comes from a fact most Pakistani commentators bury: forty years of internal wars made the military operationally practised in a way India’s is not. “Iran has practically defeated the United States because Iran has been fighting like this for forty years. India has not. India only talks.” That is the security leg of the stool. The economic leg is the one still missing.

The Iran corridor and the Central Asia map

If the talks hold, Ali Khizar can name the dividends in order. Iranian sanctions ease. The Pakistan-Iran trade route opens. Iranian energy — pipeline gas, petrochemicals — comes in at a lower cost than the LNG Pakistan currently imports. Iran is ninety million people with consumption capacity and resources. Pakistani textile, food, and manufactured goods have an obvious market across the border.

The second-order effect is Balochistan. He is careful here. The infiltration into Balochistan has historically been routed through Afghanistan and Iran, with Indian financing behind it. If the Iran channel closes off as a hostile route, the stability calculus in Balochistan changes. And if Balochistan stabilises, the mining projects — he mentions Reko Diq running in the background — become extractable assets rather than headlines.

The third-order effect is geography. He invites the listener to remember what the 1960s and 1970s looked like, before the region froze. “People used to road-travel from here to Iran, from Iran to Turkey, from there to Europe. That whole vibrancy can re-open.” Muzamil picks up the thread and adds the parallel news he has been tracking — the Pakistani trade minister meeting his Eurasian Economic Council counterpart, the just-concluded China-hosted Pakistan-Afghanistan talks. The pieces are moving in the same direction.

Who is the spoiler now

Muzamil pushes on the structural question. Pakistan’s regional ambitions have historically been spoiled by someone — either India, or a great power with different priorities. He asks whether the United States, the obvious spoiler in any China-aligned trade architecture, might actually decline to spoil this one.

Ali Khizar answers the question by reframing it. “Who is the number one spoiler for Pakistan? India.” Not just in South Asia, but everywhere — FATF, Afghanistan policy, the Albania moment in the seventies. The change he sees is that after the May engagement, India lost the ability to play that role at the volume it used to. “The world recognised it. Pakistan’s rise came through. India cannot be that spoiler the way it used to be.”

Israel, he argues, will remain a spoiler on Iran-specific issues, and India will remain a spoiler on Pakistan-specific issues. But the structural strength of those spoilers has been visibly reduced over the past year of episodes. That, in his framing, is the room Pakistan now has. The constraint that remains is internal. “The missing link is our internal cohesion — the people feel one way, the government feels another. That gap is what we have to close.” Muzamil agrees and pushes the conversation toward what happens if the optimism is misplaced.

The worst plausible scenario

Muzamil is careful not to let the conversation collapse into celebration. He reminds Ali Khizar of the petrol and diesel posts the journalist was writing only a week earlier, when an economic armageddon was sitting in plain sight. He asks for the scenario in which the ceasefire fails.

Ali Khizar excludes the nuclear case as game-over and not worth modelling. The worst plausible scenario, in his view, sits one step below that. American strikes resume but at lower intensity than the “civilization-erasing” tweet Trump had posted earlier suggested. Iran’s energy infrastructure and desalination plants are degraded. The Strait of Hormuz closes. Twenty to twenty-five percent of global oil supply and a comparable share of Qatari LNG come off the market for three to five years.

The cascade he describes is global before it is Pakistani. Oil normalises at 150 to 200 dollars. Globalization unwinds. Air travel becomes expensive. AI, which is energy-hungry by construction, rolls back. The world moves toward the consumption pattern of twenty or thirty years ago. Pakistan inside that picture is exposed and almost without buffer. “We have no petroleum strategic reserve, no energy security, no forex reserve worth speaking of.”

The one structural protection Pakistan does have, he says, is something the same policy class has spent decades criticising. “Pakistan is self-sufficient in urea. We have our own gas dedicated to the urea plants. We have water. Food security is covered. We will not starve.” Famine, he predicts, would hit large parts of the world in this scenario. Pakistan would not be among them. The progression would still go badly downward, but the country would not implode.

The elite laundromat is closing

The last passage Muzamil opens is the one Ali Khizar treats most directly. Muzamil walks through his own surprise that Pakistan agreed to begin repaying the UAE’s three-and-a-half billion dollar deposit. Historically, the UAE was where Pakistani elite money went to rest. Dubai was the laundromat — the remittance channel out the front door, the hawala channel back through the side door, the property and parking layer at the end. Antagonising that haven, he says, was almost unthinkable a few years ago.

Ali Khizar’s answer is structural rather than moral. Elite money does what elite money does — it gets made somewhere, and then it asks where it can go. The UAE was the preferred destination. It is no longer absorbing money at the same pace. “That money is not going into the UAE at the rate it used to. Even what is parked there is starting to come out.” The patron system Pakistan’s rent-seekers depended on — the soft western alignment, the easy bailouts, the deferred payments, the laundering channels — is materially weaker than it was two years ago. The choice the elite faces, in his framing, is binary. Either find a new patron and rebuild the rent-seeking elsewhere, or accept disruption from the inside and reimagine.

Muzamil’s read is consistent with the rest of the conversation. Pakistan has performed well in crisis and complacently in calm. The capability is not in doubt. The cards have been bad. The next twelve months are the first time in a generation that the cards are arguably better, and the question Ali Khizar leaves with Muzamil is whether the country’s internal coherence can rise to meet the external opening. By the end of the conversation, neither of them is willing to bet either way. They are willing to say, on the record, that the opening is real.