by Steven Richards
The role of Islamabad’s chief nuclear scientist in the beginnings of Iran’s nuclear program as well as its support for the Taliban, against U.S. interests, raise questions about whether the U.S. can rely on Pakistan as a mediator with Tehran.
The Islamic Republic of Pakistan has emerged as a key mediator between Iran and the United States as the two countries attempt to negotiate an end to the war that President Donald Trump launched earlier this year.
"Very good, we love Pakistan," Vice President JD Vance told a reporter who asked about Pakistan’s role in mediating the high-level talks between the U.S. and Iran on the shores of Lake Lucerne, Switzerland, over the weekend.
Vance specifically praised the role of Field Marshal Asim Munir, chief of Pakistan’s armed forces.
“I have joked that I have two very, very important people in my life – an Indian and a Pakistani,” Vance said this weekend during the talks. “The Indian is my wife, and the Pakistani is Field Marshal Munir.”
The summit, held at the Bürgenstock luxury hotel, brought together representatives of Iran and the United States as well as mediators from Pakistan and Qatar. Though the talks started on rocky ground, the first round concluded Monday with Vance claiming Washington and Tehran had made “great progress.”
In a joint statement, the Pakistan and Qatar mediators announced that the U.S. and Iran had agreed to a new “High Level Committee” to oversee the negotiations and the creation of a “de-confliction cell” to ensure a ceasefire in Lebanon. In a separate statement, the American vice president announced that Iran had agreed to permit International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) inspectors back into the country.
But Islamabad's history of playing a “double game” with the United States, its role in the beginning of Iran’s nuclear program, and recent exaggerations of agreements between the U.S. and Iran that later fell apart, raise questions about the country’s reliability as a go-between as negotiations continue.
“Like Qatar, the United States should never trust Pakistan to act in the United States’ best interest,” Bill Roggio, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, told Just the News.
The Embassy of Pakistan to the United States did not respond to a request for comment.
President Trump has expressed satisfaction with Pakistani mediation efforts several times since the conflict began in late February.
"Munir. He’s great. And you have the prime minister. And they just get along great. I figured, well, maybe the military guy would be – he totally respects the prime minister. It's a beautiful thing to see," Trump told Axios this weekend. "But they really helped us with this deal."
The newfound friendship between the Trump administration and Pakistan stands in stark contrast with how the country was perceived, at least initially, during the president’s first term.
On New Year’s Day in 2018, Trump issued a harsh criticism of Pakistan in an early morning post to X, which was then called Twitter, accusing the country of deceiving the United States even as the country took billions in U.S. military aid.
“The United States has foolishly given Pakistan more than 33 billion dollars in aid over the last 15 years, and they have given us nothing but lies & deceit, thinking of our leaders as fools,” Trump wrote. “They give safe haven to the terrorists we hunt in Afghanistan, with little help. No more!”
Days later, then-U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley added to the criticism, accusing Islamabad of playing a “double game” with the United States and harboring “terrorists” in the country.
“They work with us at times, and they also harbor the terrorists that attack our troops in Afghanistan,” Haley told reporters at the United Nations headquarters in New York. “That game is not acceptable to this administration.” Within days, the administration suspended millions in funding to Pakistan.
For years, Pakistan has positioned itself as a U.S. security partner while aiding actors that work against U.S. interests, according to testimony from U.S. officials and researchers.
Pakistan, specifically its Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency, is known to support the Afghan Taliban as well as the Pakistan-based Haqqani network, a group of militants that works closely with the Taliban. The support continued even as the United States battled against a Taliban insurgency in Afghanistan in opposition to the U.S.-backed government.
Despite the public spat a few years earlier, the Trump administration relied on Islamabad’s ties with the Taliban to negotiate an agreement with the group that would allow the United States to withdraw forces from Afghanistan, where they had been present since Oct. 7, 2001. The United States invaded that year to pursue the mastermind of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, Osama bin Laden.
The United States and the Taliban reached an agreement in February 2020 that set the conditions for a final U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan in exchange for a Taliban commitment not to harbor or support terrorists in its territory and to enter into negotiations with the U.S.-backed government.
While the Taliban largely upheld its commitment not to attack U.S. forces, its fighters ramped up assaults on Afghan government forces. In fact, 2020 was the “most violent year ever recorded by the United Nations in Afghanistan,” the United Nations Security Council concluded in a June 2021 report.
Additionally, the Security Council raised concerns that the Taliban’s ties with the terrorist group Al-Qaeda had grown even closer since 2001, despite its promises under the agreement. The UN estimated that as many as 10,000 fighters belonging to various militant groups remained in the country.
“The Trump administration should’ve learned its lesson when it worked with the Taliban through Pakistani mediation,” FDD’s Roggio told Just the News. “The U.S. used Pakistan as an intermediary with the Taliban, and that agreement was not worth the paper it was written on. The Taliban never lived up to those agreements.”
In August 2021, when the U.S.-backed government in the country finally collapsed and the Taliban swept back to power, Pakistani leaders celebrated even as U.S. forces withdrew from the country.
“What is happening in Afghanistan now, they have broken the shackles of slavery,” then-Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan said a day after the Taliban took the Afghan capital of Kabul.
Pakistan also played a murky role in the beginnings of Iran’s nuclear weapons program.
Trump cited the threat of that nuclear program when he decided to launch a war against the Iranian regime earlier this year and has demanded that any deal with Tehran must include the end of that program.
The transfer of Pakistani nuclear technology to Iran, North Korea and Libya is among the best-documented proliferation cases in the public record. The conduit was the network run by Abdul Qadeer Khan, head of Pakistan’s uranium-enrichment program at Khan Research Laboratories.
Khan, who was known as the “father of Pakistan's nuclear bomb,” publicly confessed on Pakistani television on February 4, 2004, to transferring nuclear technology to all three states.
Iran is widely assessed to have been Khan’s first customer. In 2005, the IAEA uncovered records of a 1987 meeting between Khan and Iranian officials. The meeting resulted in a written offer by Khan to sell nuclear technology, including the possible building blocks of a nuclear weapons program.
At the time, Iran told IAEA investigators that it declined to purchase some of the more sensitive technology used in the core of a nuclear bomb.
However, the chief financier of Khan’s network later told Malaysian police that the nuclear scientist asked him to send two containers of used centrifuge parts from Pakistan to Iran in 1994 or 1995, years after the meeting, according to NBC News.
After Iran’s nuclear program was exposed publicly, Pakistan eventually admitted in 2003 that it may have been the ultimate source for some of the sensitive nuclear equipment and knowledge required to start the program.
Islamabad denied that the government had any role in the nuclear proliferation, but admitted that some of its scientists may have acted out of "ambition or greed" to supply the technology and expertise to Tehran.
Khan, who had been removed from his position at the country’s main nuclear laboratory a few years earlier under U.S. pressure, was questioned by Pakistani authorities. Publicly, Khan insisted that he acted alone.
However, by February 2004, the Pakistani government pardoned him. Khan later said that he "saved the country for the first time when I made Pakistan a nuclear nation and saved it again when I confessed and took the whole blame on myself.”
By the time he died in 2021, Khan’s image had been largely restored by Pakistan, and the state awarded him the honor of a state funeral. Prime Minister Imran Khan called the nuclear scientist “a national icon.”
“Deeply saddened by the passing of Dr A Q Khan. He was loved by our nation bec of his critical contribution in making us a nuclear weapon state. This has provided us security against an aggressive much larger nuclear neighbour,” the prime minister said in a post to social media.
Khan’s support for Iran’s nuclear program, FDD’s Roggio told Just the News, is “yet another reason not to trust the Pakistanis.” He added, “it was pretty much brushed under the rug.”
Steven Richards
Source: https://justthenews.com/government/diplomacy/pakistan-gains-favor-trump-iran-mediator-history-raises-concerns-about-its
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