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Pakistan thought it won the peace. Now, it could be dragged into war.

By Elfadil Ibrahim | Responsible Statecraft | July 22, 2026

Four weeks ago, Pakistan looked like one of the biggest winners of the U.S.-Iran war.

Its army chief, Field Marshal Asim Munir, shuttled between Washington, Tehran and Gulf capitals for months. As part of his efforts, Pakistan hosted the first face-to-face U.S.-Iran talks in years and helped broker the Islamabad memorandum of understanding that Vice President JD Vance signed in June, thanking Munir and calling him one of the “very, very important people” in his life.

Islamabad hired a Washington lobbying firm to convert that goodwill into defense cooperation and minerals investment, and Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif spoke of a “sun of progress and prosperity” for Pakistan’s chronically stressed economy after the MoU between the U.S.and Iran brought an end to major military operations.

Pakistan’s fortunes have since reversed. Fighting between Washington and Tehran has resumed, and Islamabad’s dual goals of being Iran’s trusted interlocutor and the Arab Gulf states’ security guarantor are once again at odds.

President Donald Trump declared the deal was “over” in early July, after which the U.S. struck civilian and military targets in Iran. Iran, for its part, declared on July 18 through its deputy foreign minister, Kazem Gharibabadi, that it was “suspending all obligations” under the framework. The war has since widened into exactly the kind of multi-front regional conflict Pakistan spent the spring trying to prevent.

The clearest new exposure for Pakistan is in Saudi Arabia, where Iran struck Prince Sultan Air Base at al-Kharj — its first direct hit on Saudi territory since March — just days after the Houthis, Iran’s Yemeni ally, fired missiles on the kingdom, hitting Abha airport in the country’s south. That escalation occurred after Saudi-allied forces hit Sanaa airport in Yemen to prevent the landing of an Iranian airliner; the U.S. Treasury alleged without providing evidence that the plane is linked to Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corp. The strikes effectively enforced Riyadh’s airspace veto over the Houthi-controlled capital.

Pakistan signed a mutual defense pact with Riyadh last year. It deployed fighter jets and thousands of troops to the kingdom after earlier Iranian strikes on Saudi energy infrastructure. More recently, Islamabad has reportedly communicated to Tehran directly that attacks on Saudi Arabia will be treated as attacks on Pakistan itself. Sharif’s own statement in the aftermath called the Houthi strikes on Saudi Arabia a violation of the kingdom’s sovereignty that Pakistan “strongly condemns,” pledging “unwavering support” for Riyadh’s security.

The tone is notable given that Pakistan’s parliament explicitly refused to get entangled in Yemen over a decade ago. In April 2015, faced with a nearly identical Saudi request to join the Saudi-led coalition against the Houthis, Pakistan’s National Assembly voted unanimously to “maintain neutrality.” Islamabad’s calculus has not changed. If anything, recent events have sharpened Pakistan’s desire to broker a lasting peace.

Pakistan is home to the world’s second-largest Shia population after Iran, and the killing of Iran’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, in February set off deadly unrest in Karachi and Islamabad; Munir himself had to intervene to calm a wave of processions and pledges of allegiance to the new supreme leader across Shia neighborhoods.

Significantly, Munir and Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif attended Khamenei’s funeral in July, and Sharif posted after that “the late Supreme Leader’s wisdom, leadership and profound influence on Iran and the wider region will be remembered for generations” — a demonstration of the fine line Pakistan’s leadership has to walk, one no doubt delivered with a domestic audience in mind as much as an Iranian one.

That fine line becomes impossible to walk when a defense pact, triggered by Saudi-Houthi fighting or by further Iranian strikes on Saudi Arabia, would ask Pakistan to do the exact thing its parliament explicitly refused a decade ago: take a military side against a Houthi-Iran axis, and do so at a moment when its domestic Shia politics is highly combustible

Kuwait is now reportedly asking for the same kind of commitment that Saudi Arabia already has. Reuters reported last week that Islamabad is in early-stage talks with Kuwait — which has absorbed repeated Iranian strikes on its infrastructure in recent days — over an expanded defense agreement that would include “thousands of Pakistani troops on the ground, fighter jets, drones, an air defence system, and other defence-related facilities,” according to an anonymous Pakistani government official cited in the report.

Another anonymous Pakistani security official said the country “cannot consider a deployment of combat troops at this stage.” That hesitation suggests that stacking multiple defense commitments across Gulf states in Iran’s crosshairs makes Islamabad’s balancing act much harder to sustain. Each new pact narrows the room to claim neutrality the next time Tehran calls.

During this war, Pakistan discovered what happens when Gulf partners doubt its ability to balance between Tehran and the Arab Gulf states. The United Arab Emirates recalled a $3.5 billion loan in April and quietly began deporting Pakistani Shia workers by the thousands. The move was widely read as retaliation for Islamabad’s perceived tilt toward Tehran during the mediation. Saudi Arabia stepped in with $3 billion to cover the gap, but the lesson was clear: Pakistan’s neutrality satisfies no one fully, and the cost of disappointing any single Gulf patron is measured in the billions of dollars.

Economic self-preservation has been Pakistan’s primary motive for steering mediation and ending a war that has hobbled the economies of its creditors and choked the trade routes that power its own electric grid. Pakistan is on its 25th International Monetary Fund program; more than half of its tax revenue is put towards servicing its debts. It had barely stabilized its inflation before the Strait of Hormuz’s closure sent rates back into double digits.

In March, as the war’s first phase disrupted energy flows out of Hormuz, Islamabad ordered a two-week school closure and imposed a four-day work week to conserve fuel — measures the government has now indicated it may need to revive.

A parallel disruption to the Red Sea, like the blockade of Saudi Arabia declared by the Houthis Monday, would be highly disruptive to Pakistan’s energy security, and by extension, its economy. While Pakistan imports the overwhelming majority of its fuel from the Gulf, the closing of another critical chokepoint would simultaneously tighten global tanker capacity and insurance costs everywhere, pushing the same spot-market prices Pakistan is already struggling to afford even higher.

It would also add further pressure on Pakistan’s defense commitments to Saudi Arabia, given that Riyadh will not tolerate such a closure. In a recent statement, Riyadh pledged to deal with “Houthi threats against transiting vessels… firmly and swiftly.” The stakes for Saudi Arabia are high: Since the Strait of Hormuz was blocked, Saudi Arabia has relied on its East-West pipeline to divert roughly 5 million barrels per day of crude to the Red Sea Port of Yanbu — its only viable export outlet while Hormuz is all but closed.

None of this means Pakistan’s mediation was a mistake, or that its diplomatic capital has evaporated. Kuwait’s foreign minister still thanked Pakistan last week for its “constructive and mediatory role,” and Islamabad remains one of the few channels through which Washington and Tehran would resume talks, when the time comes. But the specific bet Pakistan made — that ending the war would allow it to bank the goodwill through commerce and financial aid — has not yet paid off.

Instead, the restart of the war has brought Saudi Arabia back into Iran’s crosshairs. At the same time, the Saudi-Houthi front has reopened, the Strait of Hormuz has been closed again, and a blockade of Saudi-linked ships on the Red Sea has been formally declared.

Each of these factors adds immense pressure on Pakistan, which now has every reason to double down on diplomacy, lest it be drawn in as a combatant.

Elfadil Ibrahim is a writer and analyst covering the politics of the Middle East and Africa, with a special focus on Sudan. His work has been featured in The Guardian, Al Jazeera, The New Arab, Open Democracy and other outlets.

July 22, 2026 Posted by aletho | Militarism | Kuwait, Middle East, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Yemen | Comments Off on Pakistan thought it won the peace. Now, it could be dragged into war.