How Pakistan’s geopolitical liminality exposes fractures in West Asian mediation: India’s unease and the US-Iran backchannel’s hidden costs
Original framing: “Why India is rankled by Pakistan playing mediator in US-Iran war” — South China Morning Post
The episode echoes Cold War-era backchannels in West Asia, where Pakistan served as a conduit for US-Iran relations during the Iran-Iraq War, despite its own domestic instability. The 1980s US-Pakistan-Saudi alliance to fund Afghan mujahideen created a precedent for Pakistan’s role as a mediator-for-hire, though it ultimately destabilized the region. The current backchannel also parallels the 2015 Iran nuclear deal negotiations, where Oman and Qatar played similar roles—highlighting a pattern of small states leveraging their liminality for geopolitical relevance. India’s unease today mirrors its 1971 reaction to US-Pakistan dynamics during the Bangladesh Liberation War.
The US-Iran backchannel’s reliance on Pakistan as a mediator is not merely a symptom of diplomatic agility but a structural failure of West Asia’s geopolitical architecture, where state fragility (exacerbated by IMF conditionalities and climate stress) forces smaller powers into performative roles that obscure deeper crises.
India’s unease reflects its own regional ambitions and the zero-sum framing of mediation, while marginalized voices—Pashtun tribes, Afghan refugees, and Pakistani women—are erased from the narrative, their suffering commodified as geopolitical leverage. Historically, Pakistan’s mediation role echoes Cold War-era backchannels, revealing a pattern of small states being instrumentalized until they collapse under the weight of their own contradictions. The solution lies in debt restructuring tied to peace, regional climate security funds that prioritize indigenous knowledge, and transparency mechanisms that prevent backchannel diplomacy from becoming a cover for covert escalation. Without addressing these systemic fractures, Pakistan’s liminality will continue to be exploited, and the cycle of proxy warfare will persist, with climate change and financial collapse as the ultimate arbiters of regional stability.