At approximately 8:00 pm Eastern Time on Tuesday, 7 April 2026, the guns paused. After forty days of US and Israeli strikes on Iranian territory – targeting military infrastructure, energy networks and command systems – a two-week ceasefire came into effect, brokered not by Washington’s traditional allies in the Gulf, not by Europe’s multilateral institutions, but by Pakistan. President Donald Trump confirmed it on Truth Social. Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi confirmed it on X., and both men used the same language to describe who made it happen: Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif and Field Marshal Asim Munir.

For the Arab commentators who had spent weeks demanding that Pakistan abandon its mediating posture and join one side of this conflict, the events of 7 April constitute a comprehensive rebuttal – not in words, but in outcomes.

The sequence of events that produced the ceasefire illuminates precisely why Pakistan’s sustained insistence on mediation – rather than partisanship – was strategically correct. Field Marshal Munir spoke directly to President Trump on 22 – 23 March, as the United States had already announced a five-day pause on strikes targeting Iranian energy infrastructure – a signal, Pakistani diplomats correctly read, that Washington was open to a diplomatic exit if one could be constructed.

With ninety minutes left on a presidential deadline that threatened to erase Iranian civilisation, Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif and Field Marshal Asim Munir made the calls that stopped the bombs. The Arab critics who demanded Pakistan choose sides have their answer — and it is one they will need to reflect on carefully.

With ninety minutes left on a presidential deadline that threatened to erase Iranian civilisation, Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif and Field Marshal Asim Munir made the calls that stopped the bombs. The Arab critics who demanded Pakistan choose sides have their answer — and it is one they will need to reflect on carefully.

On 23 March, Pakistan formally offered to host talks, with Prime Minister Sharif echoing the offer publicly within hours, tagging Trump, Iranian Foreign Minister Araghchi, and US envoy Steve Witkoff. The proposal met initial scepticism. But Pakistan did not retreat. Foreign Minister Ishaq Dar convened a quadrilateral meeting in Islamabad on 29 March – foreign ministers of Pakistan, Turkey, Egypt and Saudi Arabia – their second such gathering in ten days, building the regional architecture of consent that a ceasefire would require.

As negotiations between the US and Iran gathered pace over the 24 hours preceding Trump’s deadline, it was the 10-point framework – developed through back-channel exchanges between Islamabad, Tehran and Washington – that provided the workable basis for agreement. Vice President JD Vance later acknowledged this directly, noting that the second and third iterations of Iran’s proposals were shaped through Pakistani intermediation and were fundamentally more workable than what Tehran had originally submitted.

If Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif was Pakistan’s public face in this diplomatic intervention, Field Marshal Asim Munir – Pakistan’s Chief of Army Staff and Chief of Defence Forces – was the operational engine behind it, emerging as a pivotal figure in the behind-the-scenes efforts that ultimately stopped the war. His contribution was not ceremonial. According to sources familiar with the negotiations, Field Marshal had been in contact “all night long” with US Vice President JD Vance, special envoy Steve Witkoff, and Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi – holding open, simultaneously, both ends of a channel between parties that had no direct trust in each other. From 22 to 23 March, Field Marshal spoke directly to President Trump at a moment when Washington was weighing whether a diplomatic off-ramp existed at all, planting the seed of what would eventually become the ceasefire framework. That relationship had its roots in the 2025 India-Pakistan conflict, when Trump publicly claimed credit for brokering a ceasefire between the two nuclear-armed neighbours – an episode that opened a direct and personal channel between Field Marshal and the Oval Office. Crucially, shortly before announcing the ceasefire, Trump made two phone calls: one to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and one to Field Marshal – a sequencing that speaks volumes about whose counsel the American president sought in the final minutes before the deadline. Appointed in December 2025 as Pakistan’s first-ever Chief of Defence Forces – a dual-hatted role combining the CDF and COAS offices under a single authority – Munir brought to the negotiating table not only personal rapport with world leaders but the institutional weight of Pakistan’s unified military command. What the ceasefire ultimately demonstrated is that in the most dangerous ninety minutes of the Middle East crisis, the world did not call a diplomat. It called Field Marshal Munir.

The diplomatic significance of how both parties acknowledged Pakistan cannot be overstated. Trump stated explicitly that he had agreed to halt operations “based on conversations with Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif and Field Marshal Asim Munir” – a direct presidential attribution, on the record, in the most public forum available to the American head of state.

Araghchi’s statement was, if anything, more striking. The Iranian foreign minister expressed gratitude to “dear brothers” Sharif and Munir for their “tireless efforts,” confirming that Iran had accepted the ceasefire “in response to the brotherly request of PM Sharif.” For Tehran – a government that is scrupulously attentive to the diplomatic register of its public statements – the use of the word “brotherly” was not incidental. It was a deliberate signal of the trust Pakistan had earned across months of careful engagement.

The international response was swift and unambiguous. German Chancellor Friedrich Merz thanked Pakistan for its mediation, calling for a lasting end to the war. The European Council president credited Pakistan as central to the agreement. Australia, Kazakhstan and Saudi Arabia all acknowledged Islamabad’s role publicly.

The question that Pakistan’s Arab critics must now answer is not why Islamabad refused to join their coalition – but why, when the moment of maximum pressure arrived, neither Washington nor Tehran turned to Riyadh, Abu Dhabi or Cairo as the indispensable intermediary. The answer lies in the structural reality that Pakistan had argued for all along.

Pakistan shares a 900-kilometre border with Iran and carries deep historical, cultural and religious ties with Tehran – Iran was the first country to recognise Pakistan after independence in 1947, and Pakistan reciprocated recognition of the Islamic Republic after the 1979 revolution. Pakistan is home to the world’s second-largest Shia Muslim population after Iran. It represents Iranian diplomatic interests in Washington, where Tehran has no embassy. And Field Marshal Munir had, through the Pakistan-India de-escalation of 2025, built a personal rapport with President Trump that gave Islamabad a channel into the Oval Office that few states could match.

The criticism that had circulated in Arab media and policy circles rested on a deceptively clean logic: that a true ally cannot be a neutral arbiter, and that Pakistan’s mediation constituted either naivety or betrayal. That argument has now been tested against reality and found wanting.

The ceasefire is explicitly a pause, not a peace. Trump himself acknowledged as much, describing the two-week period as time to finalise and consummate a larger agreement. Iran’s National Security Council has confirmed that talks will begin in Islamabad on Friday, 10 April 2026, with Vice President Vance leading the American delegation – a significant signal of how seriously Washington regards the process and its host.

The terrain ahead is formidable. Iran’s 10-point framework includes demands for US military withdrawal from the region, full sanctions relief and compensation for war damages – positions that will require substantial negotiation to bridge with American red lines. Israel’s continued operations in Lebanon, which both Tehran and Hezbollah insist must be covered by the ceasefire, represent a persistent threat to the fragile truce. And the domestic politics of both Washington and Tehran impose real constraints on what their negotiators can concede.

Yet, as Iran expert Trita Parsi observed, “the terrain has shifted.” Pakistan’s role does not end with the ceasefire announcement. As PM Sharif has indicated, Islamabad intends to remain the convening authority for talks, the linguistic bridge in moments of impasse and, if necessary, the go-between if the parties cannot face each other directly. That role is now globally acknowledged – and it is one that Pakistan’s decision to remain a mediator, rather than a partisan, has made possible.

The writer is a freelance columnist

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