Brussels, April 28 Pakistan’s bid to establish itself as a key mediator between the United States and Iran unravelled within days, raising serious concerns over trust and diplomatic credibility, a report said on Tuesday.
Writing for 'EuropaWire', Dimitra Staikou, a Greek lawyer, writer, and journalist, noted that Pakistan was never the credible middle ground its government has attempted to portray.
“The diplomatic theatre that Islamabad had spent more than a week preparing for unravelled in less than seventy-two hours, and the unravelling was not accidental. President Donald Trump’s decision to halt the planned visit of Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner to Pakistan, together with his stated preference for telephone diplomacy over a sixteen-hour flight to Islamabad, exposed something that had been concealed beneath the choreography of the past fortnight,” Staikou stated.
According to the expert, Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi’s discreet shift from Islamabad to Muscat, where he met Oman's Sultan Haitham bin Tariq at Al-Baraka Palace on April 26, underscored a clear reality: “Tehran trusts Oman in a way it does not trust Pakistan, and the channel that matters has shifted accordingly.”
The sequence of events, Staikou said, reflects the shift, with Araghchi arriving in Rawalpindi on the evening of April 25 and meeting Pakistani Army Chief Asim Munir, Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif and Foreign Minister Ishaq Dar before departing for Muscat ahead of the arrival of the American delegation.
Within hours, Trump called off his envoys' visit, describing the travel to Islamabad as “excessive and dismissing the Iranian leadership as fractured”.
“The Pakistani government, which had imposed a near-total lockdown on the capital for over a week, including suspension of public transport, sealing of the Red Zone, and deployment of more than ten thousand security personnel, found itself hosting a conversation that one side declined to attend in person and the other side declined to fly to. Two American C-17 aircraft carrying security equipment quietly flew out of Nur Khan Airbase shortly afterwards,” Staikou mentioned.
She stressed that the consequences of the failed Pakistan-hosted talks between the US and Iran are unfolding in Islamabad itself. The capital has remained under lockdown for more than a week, with the ‘Red Zone’ sealed, shops in the Blue Area deserted, and daily commuters left stranded, while one principal cast doubt on the mediator’s neutrality and the other dismissed the venue as too inconvenient.
The resulting discontent in the city, she argued, is not merely “logistical” but "reputational".
Emphasising that Pakistan has reduced a serious mediation issue to a failing public-relations exercise, Staikou said, 'A state that aspired to become the indispensable hinge of US-Iran diplomacy has found itself bypassed for Muscat within days of hosting both sides. Mediation is a function of trust earned over decades, not of geographic proximity or episodic favour with an American administration. Pakistan has the second of those, briefly enjoyed the third, and possesses none of the first.”
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