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The writer argues that it’s time for Pakistan to spell it out to the US: ‘Stop treating negotiations with Iran as coerced confession. Accept terms compatible with sovereign parity.’
By PROFESSOR JUNAID S AHMAD
THERE are few habits in client-state politics more revealing than the urge to decorate empire’s latest strongman with the language of peace. Some time ago, Islamabad flirted with the idea that Donald Trump deserved a Nobel Peace Prize. If Pakistan still insists on indulging that theatre, it should at least abandon the farce of nominating Trump and pursue the more interesting vanity project: Shehbaz Sharif should try to win it himself.
Not because the Nobel Peace Prize is some sacred moral instrument. It is a political trophy, often less a judgment on peace than a referendum on geopolitical fashion. Precisely for that reason, it should be used politically. If Sharif insists on playing this game, he should stop wasting the script on Trump and cast himself in the lead role.
The path is obvious. Sharif should use Pakistan’s current geopolitical leverage to pressure Washington into a real agreement with Iran: not another American ultimatum disguised as diplomacy, not another ceasefire designed to collapse on schedule, not another ‘final offer’ whose essence is that Tehran must surrender politely while its adversaries yield nothing. A genuine non-aggression framework — one that respects Iranian sovereignty, preserves Iranian dignity, and ends the juvenile fantasy that bombardment can produce strategic obedience.
That would be a more serious peace gesture than nominating the man most likely to confuse diplomacy with real-estate branding.
Pakistan, for once, has leverage worth spending. It is useful to Washington, structurally tied to Beijing, financially sustained by Gulf capital, and positioned at precisely the geography where imperial overreach repeatedly comes to grief. Islamabad cannot dictate events, but it occupies that rare middle rank in world politics where a state can make itself too costly to ignore.
And Sharif should say plainly what weaker states are usually trained never to say aloud: Pakistan is no longer under exclusive American tutelage. Its military dependence has shifted sharply toward China; its energy solvency depends more on Gulf lifelines than American approval. The United States matters, yes — but not in the monopolistic way it once did. That changes the tone of conversation. Islamabad can now tell Washington what few allies dare: stop treating negotiations with Iran as coerced confession. Accept terms compatible with sovereign parity. Stop demanding that Tehran emerge strategically declawed while its adversaries concede nothing proportionate. Stop mistaking domination for diplomacy merely because both can be packaged in the language of formal negotiation.
That alone would amount to serious statecraft. But Sharif cannot plausibly audition for the theatre of peace abroad while presiding over repression at home. A government that brokers de-escalation in Tehran while incarcerating its principal opposition figures in Lahore and Rawalpindi is not practicing statesmanship; it is staging irony.
So, the second move is as necessary as the first: release political prisoners, beginning with Imran Khan and extending outward to the broader population of detained dissidents, prosecuted critics, and opposition activists.
This is not sentimental liberal garnish. It is political and moral consistency.
A government cannot indefinitely mediate abroad while strangling consent at home and expect the contradiction not to become glaring.
A Pakistan that helps avert war on Iran while ending repression at home would not become virtuous overnight — let us not wander into fairy tales. But it would become something rarer: a state intelligent enough to recognise that external diplomacy and internal suffocation make an ugly pair. Legitimacy cannot forever be subcontracted to geopolitical usefulness. A government cannot indefinitely mediate abroad while strangling consent at home and expect the contradiction not to become glaring.
And let us be candid: Sharif’s government does not appear to be vanishing tomorrow. Since it is likely to remain, it should risk something larger than managed survival. History occasionally hands mediocre governments magnificent opportunities; most squander them by mistaking access for achievement and proximity for power.
Pakistan is now sitting in one of those moments.
If Sharif insists on speaking the language of Nobel ambition, then let him pursue it in the only way that would be faintly interesting: by helping force Trump and Washington away from war and toward an agreement with Iran that respects the intelligence of the region — and by pairing that external manoeuvre with the minimal domestic decency of freeing political prisoners.
Otherwise, the entire exercise remains what so much official diplomacy already is: vanity wearing a peace pin.
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Prof Junaid S Ahmad teaches Law, Religion, and Global Politics and is the Director of the Center for the Study of Islam and Decolonization (CSID), Islamabad, Pakistan. He is a member of the International Movement for a Just World (JUST – https://just-international.org/), Movement for Liberation from Nakba (MLN – https://nakbaliberation.com/), and Saving Humanity and Planet Earth (SHAPE – https://www.theshapeproject.com/).
