Pakistan delivers ‘Islamic peace’, saves Iran?

Discussions on the ‘Islamabad Memorandum of Understanding between the United States of America and the Islamic Republic of Iran’ seem to ignore or downplay the treacherous role Pakistan has played in the peace talks. So treacherous that it helped transform Iran’s military rout into its strategic victory.

Let’s begin with the beginning. Months before US President Donald Trump and his Iranian counterpart Masoud Pezeshkian signed the MoU, there was another MoU (signed in January)—between Pakistan and a firm linked to World Liberty Financial (WLF), the crypto business that has ties to Trump’s sons Eric and Trump Jr and son-in-law Jared Kushner. The MoU aims to “explore innovation in digital finance, particularly the use of stablecoins for cross-border transactions.”

WLF is co-founded by Zachary Witkoff, son of Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff. The young Witkoff signed the deal with Finance Minister Muhammad Aurangzeb. It came after almost a year of negotiations between people with links to President Trump’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., and Pakistani officials. One of the negotiators was Texas investor Gentry Beach, a former close friend of Donald Trump Jr. Along with a group of investors, Beach reportedly travelled to Pakistan in January 2025 and held several rounds of meetings with Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif and senior officials.

The close ties between Trump’s family and friends and Pakistan explain Washington’s tilt towards Islamabad in the last 16 months or so. A notorious terror-exporting rogue state that harbored Osama bin Laden and which was slammed by, among others, Trump himself in his first term. In December 2018, he had castigated, and rightly so, Pakistan for offering a “safe haven.” A few months earlier, he had said: “We have been paying Pakistan billions and billions of dollars at the same time they are housing the very terrorists that we are fighting.”

One has to be infinitely naïve, if not gullible, to believe that in the last few years Pakistan has reformed itself; if anything, it has become worse; now, it has an incumbent Field Marshal, Asim Munir, who is a serious Islamist. And Trump is anything but naïve; nothing other than the dealings of his family and friends explains his newfound love of Pakistan.

Trump is a great president, because he has begun, in the words of the classicist and historian Victor Davis Hanson, a “counter-revolution”—that is, the process of the United States’ systemic shift towards the Leftwing agenda at the expense of the ideas, ideals, and values of its great Constitution. Yet his failure in Pakistan is conspicuous. It led to his statements on Operation Sindoor, which, in turn, gave the impression that the skirmish was a draw in which Pakistan had the upper hand. The truth, however, was that our armed forces had soundly thrashed Pakistan, forcing it to beg for a ceasefire. Our military success appeared a strategic setback in the eyes of the world.

Pakistan returned the favor in its characteristic manner: its intervention has made the American military’s win look like a strategic loss. Quite apart from the usual criticism from liberals (who would denounce him anyway on anything), there is wide condemnation of the deal from the Western Right. Even in the US, Michael Rubin, senior fellow at the Centre-Right American Enterprise Institute and former Pentagon official, called the MoU “nothing short of a disaster, saying, “Trump’s chief accomplishment, unfortunately, has been to make Neville Chamberlain look like Winston Churchill.”

Trump’s folly is Pakistan’s accomplishment: it has been able to deliver “Islamic peace,” so to speak. I am referring to “an Islamic bomb,” contradistinguishing it with Islamic peace that it has finally helped deliver. In the 1970s, Pakistan vowed to make “an Islamic bomb.” As Prime Minister, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto had thundered that “we will eat leaves and grass, even go hungry” to build the country’s own weapons. “There’s a Hindu bomb, a Jewish bomb and a Christian bomb,” Bhutto once wrote. Ergo, “there must be an Islamic bomb.”

In the name of the Islamic bomb that it promised, Pakistan even managed to receive $100 million from Libya’s former dictator, Muammar el-Qaddafi.

Convinced that Pakistan’s nuclear status for the entire Muslim world, Iranian Commander Mohsen Rezaei claimed last year, “Pakistan has assured us that if Israel uses a nuclear bomb on Iran, they will attack Israel with a nuclear bomb.” But Pakistan quickly disabused Tehran of any fantastic ideas about the so-called Islamic bomb. Defence Minister Khawaja Muhammad Asif posted on X, “Our nuclear capability is for the benefit of our people and defence of our country against the hostile designs of our enemies.”

With its top military and political leadership physically liquidated, navy at the bottom of the sea, air defences smashed, and inventories of drones and missiles severely depleted, Tehran was on its last legs. It is a testament to the shenanigans of Pakistan’s mediators that they managed to hold back the US-Israeli attack.

Pakistan seems to have redeemed itself in the Muslim world by delivering Islamic peace, even if it failed, indeed refused, to give an Islamic bomb. It saved Iran—to be precise, the jihadist regime in Tehran.

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