[Pakistan’s Great Game]-From Iran to Afghanistan: Islamabad Faces the Challenges of Its Neighborhood

Till recently, Pakistan was rather ostracized by the international community. The 2022 imprisonment of Imran Khan and the military’s crackdown on supporters of this ousted-yet highly popular-prime minister had earned the country widespread condemnation in the West. Yet a coalition of political parties maintained a facade of civilian respectability in the country, even though real power was exercised by the military, which had seized it in the aftermath without formally taking control.

Now, for about a year, Islamabad has been at the center of the game in the Middle East and beyond, as evidenced by the good-offices mission it successfully undertook between the United States and Iran on March 23, 2026.

The fact that Islamabad has since become the venue for talks between U.S. and Iranian authorities has certainly intrigued observers and alarmed New Delhi, which, under the Narendra Modi administration, has relentlessly sought to isolate Pakistan on the international stage by portraying it as a terrorist state.

What Do Pakistan’s Leaders Want?

One of Islamabad’s primary objectives is, of course, to bring an end as quickly as possible to a conflict that is causing its economy great hardship, not only because of its dependence on hydrocarbons from the Gulf, but also because of the significant remittances sent home by millions of expatriate workers throughout the region.

Beyond that, the strategy of Islamabad and Rawalpindi-the seat of the army’s headquarters-is structured around three pillars that correspond to three concentric circles. The top priority continues to be the immediate neighborhood-and even the territory of Pakistan itself-to which we will devote the first part of this study. This focus naturally ties in with that of the Middle East, where Pakistan is currently contributing to a reshuffling of the regional landscape that could permanently transform the regional balance of power, especially if Egypt and Turkey were to join the axis formed by Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. Beyond that, Pakistan is striving to maintain its privileged partnership with China, restore its standing with the United States, and forge a special relationship with the European Union.

Since 1947, Pakistan has lived in constant fear of the Indian threat: New Delhi is suspected of intending to reverse the Partition to restore what Hindu nationalists-led by Narendra Modi-call "Akhand Bharat," or "Undivided India," a map of which has hung in the Indian parliament since 2023. Pakistan’s fears have been exacerbated by military defeats, particularly that of 1971, which allowed India to loosen its grip by facilitating the creation of Bangladesh. In response, Islamabad has implemented two unconventional strategies: "from above" by acquiring nuclear weapons (with the help of China and Saudi Arabia-we’ll return to this) and "from below" through jihadist groups that have carried out a growing number of attacks in Indian-administered Kashmir and elsewhere.

India has responded to these attacks with increasing vigor. In the spring of 2025, in response to the Pahalgam attack, New Delhi ordered strikes targeting jihadist training camps and military installations. But Pakistanis’ main fear lies elsewhere: Islamabad and Rawalpindi fear above all that India will forge ties with Pakistan’s neighbors, which would then leave Pakistan caught in a pincer movement. This apprehension applies first and foremost to Afghanistan, a country where the Pakistani military has sought to establish a presence through the Taliban precisely to secure "strategic depth" against India. However, the Taliban’s return to Kabul has created a very different situation: as true nationalists, the Taliban have resisted Pakistani pressure and refused to recognize the Durand Line as an international border. Tensions have continued to rise between the two countries, to the point that Pakistan is deporting thousands of Afghan "refugees," some of whom have been on Pakistani soil since the 1980s.

In "return," the Taliban allowed the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP)-Pakistani Islamists who had retreated to the Afghan mountains-to strike Pakistan through a series of attacks. Worse still: in the fall of 2025, the Taliban foreign minister made a week-long (!) visit to India that marked a thaw in Afghan-Indian relations, heralding the return of Indians to Kabul. It was against this backdrop that in early 2026, the Pakistani military decided to bomb Afghan sites described as strategic. The Afghan retaliation sparked an unprecedented war between two countries long considered "brothers in arms." The war in Iran began at the same time: the mediating role that Pakistan offered to play was partly shaped by the Afghan-Pakistani hostilities, as it allowed Pakistan to deflect criticism condemning the civilian casualties caused by the bombing of Afghan cities: as long as the world (starting with the United States) needed Pakistan, it would look the other way.

The fear of being encircled by India also sheds light on Pakistan’s strategy toward Iran itself. New Delhi has indeed sought to forge relations with Tehran based on a geopolitical calculation similar to the one employed with regard to Afghanistan. To outflank Pakistan, India acquired a portion of the port of Chabahar, located in eastern Iran, just 72 km from the port of Gwadar, built by the Chinese in Pakistani Balochistan. Chabahar, at the entrance to the Persian Gulf, was intended to serve as a counterpart to Gwadar-where the Indians fear Chinese warships might one day anchor-and to give India access to Afghanistan via roads and railways. This Indian presence on Pakistan’s doorstep was all the more concerning to Islamabad given that Balochistan is plagued by a separatist movement employing increasingly sophisticated methods, as evidenced in 2024 and 2025 by a series of attacks targeting, in particular, Chinese engineers working on the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), a flagship project of the Silk Roads. Pakistan accused India of conducting destabilization operations on its territory by arming Baloch guerrillas and infiltrating agents of the RAW (the Indian intelligence agency), one of whose officials (K. Jadhav) was allegedly arrested on Pakistani soil.

Offering to mediate allowed Pakistan to rebuild ties with Iran at a time when the two countries shared a common goal: curbing Baloch separatism, while Tehran was concerned about Donald Trump’s calls for insurrection directed at Iranian minorities-calls that, beyond the Kurds, also targeted the Baloch (the vast majority of whom are Sunni Muslims and who, too, are plagued by irredentist separatism).

But Pakistan’s objective, of course, went much further: drawing closer to Iran would allow it to sideline India by arguing that New Delhi was, in any case, increasingly aligned with Tel Aviv (hadn’t Narendra Modi paid an official visit there the day before the first Israeli strikes on Iran in February 2026?) -not to mention that India, yielding to U.S. pressure, had stopped investing in Chabahar and importing Iranian oil months earlier.

For Pakistan, positioning itself as a mediator had another advantage vis-à-vis Iran: it allowed Pakistan to avoid coming to Saudi Arabia’s defense in the event of Iranian attacks on the kingdom-attacks that Riyadh might have considered grounds for activating the mutual defense agreement signed with Islamabad in 2025, a point that bridges the transition to an issue broader than that of the immediate region, Pakistan’s Middle East strategy.

Copyright Fabrice Coffrini / POOL / AFP
Pakistani Prime Minister Muhammad Shehbaz Sharif and Army Chief Marshal Asim Munir in Switzerland on June 21, 2026.