Welcome to Foreign Policy’s South Asia Brief.
The highlights this week: Pakistan presents itself as a potential mediator in the Iran war, after a brief cease-fire the Pakistan-Afghanistan conflict resumes, and Nepal’s new government prepares to take office.
Pakistan the Peace Broker?
Axios and the Financial Times have reported that Pakistan is actively engaged in mediation efforts between the United States and Iran, with Pakistani leaders speaking separately with U.S. President Donald Trump and Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian earlier this week. Pakistan may even host talks with senior U.S. and Iranian officials in Islamabad in the coming days.
Pakistan might seem an unlikely mediator. It has a deep alliance with Iran’s rival Saudi Arabia, capped with a mutual defense pact last year. It is bogged down with its own conflict with Afghanistan. And Pakistan has no track record of mediating complex Middle East conflicts—unlike China, for example, which contributed to Iranian-Saudi reconciliation in 2023.
But in fact, a mediation role for Pakistan makes sense: It’s a rare country that has warm ties with both the United States and Iran and is engaged with the highest levels of both governments.
Islamabad’s ties with Tehran have come a long way since January 2024, when the two engaged in a brief violent conflict over cross-border militancy. In the last year, Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif and Army chief Asim Munir have held multiple meetings with top Iranian leaders in Iran and Pakistan.
Meanwhile, Sharif and Munir have met with Trump as well, including a lunch hosted for Munir at the White House last June—soon after the Pakistani official returned from a trip to Tehran before the brief Iran-Israel conflict. Afterward, Trump told the media that Pakistanis “know Iran very well, better than most.”
A few weeks later, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio praised Pakistan for its willingness to play a role as mediator with Iran. Trump, who has repeatedly praised Munir, may have even personally pitched for him to participate.
There are other factors working to Pakistan’s advantage as a mediator. One is bureaucratic, as Islamabad represents Tehran’s diplomatic interests in Washington. Another involves personnel: Pakistan has dealt closely with the family of a key player on the U.S. side: Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff.
Pakistan has engaged with Witkoff’s son Zach on cryptocurrency issues, including recently signing a memorandum of understanding with one of the younger Witkoff’s companies. Given the significance of personality in current White House policy, that is nothing to sneeze at—and has likely bolstered Pakistan’s influence within the Trump administration.
More than other potential mediators, Pakistan has a strong incentive to de-escalate the conflict. It borders Iran to the east, making it especially vulnerable to spillover—the last thing it needs as it wages what it calls an “open war” with the Taliban elsewhere. Pakistan also depends heavily on energy from the Middle East; it could soon face severe shortages of liquefied natural gas.
Furthermore, with Iran targeting Saudi Arabia with missiles and drones, Pakistan doesn’t want to be pressured to invoke its relatively new mutual defense pact—it doesn’t want to get dragged into war. This has likely all contributed to Islamabad’s decision to proactively pitch itself as a mediator, rather than wait for a formal request from the warring parties.
These efforts could fall short—whether because of Trump’s unpredictability, Pakistan’s lack of formal ties with Israel, or an Iranian refusal to talk face-to-face with U.S. negotiators due to mistrust.
Still, Pakistan’s efforts to this point speak to the growing diplomatic influence that it enjoys in the Middle East. That’s a major boon for Pakistan’s strategic interests, given its critical energy imports from the region, the several million Pakistani expatriates based there, and that the Middle East is home to some of the country’s closest allies and donors.
More broadly, Pakistan’s prime mediation role amplifies a contradiction that has played out for months: the country enjoying an extended geopolitical moment in the sun, even as it continues to suffer from cascading challenges at home.
What We’re Following
South Asia feels the heat. De-escalation in the Iran war can’t come soon enough for South Asia as it grapples with severe energy shortages and other bad economic consequences. But it’s also facing another uncomfortable challenge, thanks to its proximity to the conflict zone: The war is creeping closer to the region, and countries are having to do more to distance themselves from it.
In early March, a U.S. submarine sank an Iranian ship off Sri Lanka that had participated in joint naval exercises in India. Last week, Sri Lanka said it had declined a U.S. request earlier that month to land two combat jets at a civilian airport. Sergio Gor, the U.S. ambassador to India, might have discussed the war during a five-day visit to Sri Lanka and the Maldives that ended on Tuesday.
Additionally, last Friday, U.S. officials said Iran fired missiles at Diego Garcia, an Indian Ocean island that hosts a joint U.S.-U.K. military base. (Tehran denies this.) Most South Asian states, like much of the global south, are nonaligned and avoid getting dragged into other countries’ conflicts. But the war in Iran is becoming much too close for comfort.
Afghanistan-Pakistan conflict resumes. On Tuesday, the Taliban regime said that Pakistan had launched drone strikes in northern Afghanistan just after a brief truce between the two countries expired. Afghan media cited local sources that said Pakistani strikes hit a Taliban military facility. The Taliban denied that claim, contending they took down the drones.
Pakistan denied that it had engaged in strikes that violated the temporary cease-fire, but renewed hostilities are not surprising. Pakistani and Taliban forces have been fighting for weeks, and neither side described the truce—in observation of Eid al-Fitr—as an open-ended one.
Still, that the two sides didn’t use the opening to seek an extended cease-fire speaks to challenges of de-escalating the conflict—particularly when the Iran war has bogged down Qatar and Saudi Arabia, which brokered earlier rounds of Afghanistan-Pakistan talks.
U.S. citizen freed in Afghanistan. Dennis Coyle, an American held captive by the Taliban since January 2025, was released this week. According to Coyle’s family, he was held in near-solitary confinement and was never charged with a crime. Coyle, a 64-year-old academic researcher, worked in Afghanistan for nearly 20 years before his detainment.
On Tuesday, Rubio announced that Coyle was on his way home and thanked Qatar and the United Arab Emirates for their efforts to help free him. The timing is significant, coming after the Trump administration designated Afghanistan as a state sponsor of wrongful detention—with senior U.S. officials issuing warnings to the Taliban of the potential costs to not releasing remaining U.S. captives.
This marked an abrupt shift for the Trump administration, which previously used quiet diplomacy with the Taliban to push for the release of U.S. citizens, resulting in at least two of them being freed last year. It appears that the administration was getting frustrated; on the day the designation was announced, Rubio said that the Taliban’s “despicable tactics need to end.”
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Under the Radar
Nepal will swear in South Asia’s newest government on Friday. Balendra Shah, the 35-year-old former mayor of Kathmandu, will take office as the country’s prime minister. In a rarity for Nepal, the government will be led by a party other than the Nepali Congress and the country’s two large leftist parties.
Those three traditional parties have dominated politics since the end of Nepal’s monarchy in 2008. Shah’s upstart Rastriya Swatantra Party (RSP) ran its election campaign on an anti-corruption plank, building on the major theme driving the mass protests that ousted the previous government last September.
The RSP has already signaled that it plans to do things differently. The party announced that its swearing-in ceremony will be understated, with a small guest list that doesn’t include any foreign leaders. The no-frills ceremony will likely play well among the public, especially the young people who led last year’s protests, that has pushed for cleaner and more efficient government.
Shah has a strong public mandate to produce that outcome: His party enjoyed a landslide election victory, winning a two-thirds parliamentary majority.
