Pakistan brokered the peace. Western media saw only oil

When the United States and Iran reached their peace deal, Donald Trump marked the moment on Truth Social with nine words: “Ships of the world, start your engines. Let the oil flow.” Nine words, and not one of them for the country that had spent four months quietly keeping that deal alive.

For four months, Pakistan’s army chief was in Tehran, meeting not just political leaders but the Revolutionary Guards, while maintaining simultaneous contact with Washington, ensuring no Iranian power center felt excluded from a process that could collapse at any provocation. That mediation didn’t end with the ceasefire. Islamabad has since facilitated follow-up talks between Washington and Tehran in Switzerland, brokered the safe return of dozens of Iranian sailors and fishermen rescued at sea, and worked to keep open channels between Riyadh and Tehran even as suspicion between the two capitals remained high. It wasn’t even the first time Pakistan’s role was talked over rather than to. Weeks earlier, as Pakistan’s interior minister was in Tehran trying to stop a fragile ceasefire from collapsing entirely, Trump used the moment not to acknowledge the effort but to threaten the other party directly: “For Iran, the Clock is Ticking, and they better get moving, FAST, or there won’t be anything left of them. TIME IS OF THE ESSENCE!” The pattern was already set well before the ships and the oil. 

When western powers bring their alliances to a negotiating table, it is called leverage. When Pakistan does the same, it becomes a conflict of interest.

Muna Khan

What coverage Pakistan’s role did receive often treated it with suspicion rather than credit. RFE/RL ran the question as a headline outright: Was Pakistan a mediator, or a “strategic opportunist?” The frame doesn’t allow for both, even though every mediator in history has acted from some mixture of principle and interest. The same piece quoted Indian analyst Brahma Chellaney dismissing the entire effort on social media, characterizing Pakistan as little more than political cover, a line repeated and amplified far more than anything Pakistani diplomats said on the record.

When CBS News reported that Iranian aircraft had been parked at a Pakistani air base during the ceasefire, citing anonymous US officials, the story was framed not as evidence of a mediator maintaining trusted backchannels, which is precisely what mediators do, but as a mediator caught hiding something, “potentially shielding” Iranian planes from American airstrikes. Islamabad’s denial that the aircraft were there for diplomatic logistics, not military shelter, never made the same headlines the original claim did. The accusation alone was enough for Senator Lindsey Graham to call for a “complete reevaluation” of Pakistan’s role as mediator, the suspicion translating instantly into political consequence in a way that four months of actual diplomacy never did.

As someone who has spent the last decade teaching media literacy and journalism, I’ve come to recognize the pattern instantly: when western powers bring their alliances and relationships to a negotiating table, it is called leverage, experience, diplomatic skill. When Pakistan does the same, drawing on decades of relationships with Tehran, Riyadh and Washington alike, it becomes, at best, a footnote, and at worst, a conflict of interest. Even coverage that credited Pakistan’s effectiveness often did so by foregrounding motive over competence.

One NPR report on the mediation moved quickly past the diplomacy itself to stress self-interest instead. “There’s always going to be an element of self-interest,” said Margaret Mcmillan in the interview, “but I think the economic side is perhaps more visible than it has often been in the past.” Qatar and Egypt, mediating the same conflict with their own obvious stakes in regional stability, rarely received that same instinctive audit.

The facts were identical. The framing was not.

This isn’t a new complaint. It’s the same vocabulary

Western coverage has long applied more broadly to this war. When the United States and Israel struck Iran in February, outlets like the Washington Post called it a “bold daytime attack,” language built for precision and courage. When Iran responded, the same outlets reached for “escalation” and “provocation.” A missile that killed, according to Al Jazeera, at least 170 people, mostly schoolgirls, near Minab was covered with qualifiers: “near a military base,” “appears to show.” The framing protects some actors and indicts others before a single fact is confirmed. Pakistan’s mediation simply received the quieter version of the same treatment: not vilified, just erased.

This is what at least four months of coverage amounts to: not just bias in the abstract, but a hierarchy of whose actions register as strategy and whose register as suspicion, whose suffering is named and whose isn’t; whose peace-making is worth a credit line. Trump’s Truth Social post confirmed it with a clarity no editorial could match.

“Ships of the world, start your engines. Let the oil flow.”

Not the schoolgirls of Minab. Not the families displaced by months of bombardment. Not the Pakistani diplomats who shuttled between Washington and Tehran to pull this back from the brink, sailors and fishermen safely home, and two suspicious neighbors still talking to each other. The ships. The oil. The money.

Edward Said wrote that Israel was in a state of delusion about itself. One wonders whether western media is in a similar state, convinced of its own objectivity while its language quietly decides who gets to be a peacemaker and who gets to be a problem. The war may be over. The framing never stops.

The writer is a journalist and conducts writing workshops in Karachi

X: @ledeinglady