Shanzay Minhal
Pakistan has single-handedly destroyed India’s delusion of so-called hegemony in the region. Since May 2025, Pakistan’s standing in the region and the world has shifted in ways that are difficult to attribute to coincidence. What began as a four day military clash with India, triggered by the Pahalgam attack and India’s Operation Sindoor, has evolved over the following year into a broader story of Pakistan reasserting itself, diplomatically, economically, and in terms of pure global relevance.
From the outset, Islamabad’s official messaging leaned on restraint and legal framing rather than triumphalism, grounding its position in sovereignty and the right to respond at a time, place and manner of its own choosing. India’s early messaging, by contrast, leaned heavily on speed and emotional framing, and when its initial claims did not hold up, the damage to credibility had already been done, a vulnerability that widened as the conflict wore on.
Much of the credit for how that narrative was managed goes to the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, which synchronized its messaging with the military from the first hours of the crisis. It coordinated joint briefings that laid out timelines and evidence, ran international press engagements with outlets such as CNN, BBC, Sky News, Al Arabiya and TRT World, and led delegations of local and international journalists to sites India had alleged were terrorist camps, including Bela Noor Shah, where they found markets and homes rather than militant infrastructure.
The ministry also ran a coordinated digital campaign, tailoring content platform by platform, describing the effort a year later, at a seminar marking what Pakistan has come to call Marka-e-Haq, as one built on national unity, a coordinated state response, and timely dissemination of facts at the global level. Well into 2026, it has continued to publicly call out and rebut what it describes as coordinated disinformation campaigns aimed at undermining Pakistan’s peace role, insisting that domestic fact checking institutions have already debunked them.
None of this would have carried the same weight without Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif’s own posture. He offered India a fair, transparent and independent investigation into the Pahalgam incident before the war even escalated, a move that put New Delhi on the back foot internationally and became a major boost to Pakistan’s case. He has since carried that same diplomatic instinct onto a global stage, appearing at the Gaza peace conference in Egypt alongside world leaders, publicly praising President Trump’s peacemaking, and repeatedly framing Pakistan as a stabilizing actor in the region. At home, the Prime Minister has worked to project a sense of internal cohesion, describing the unity displayed by Pakistanis during the May conflict as a moment where the country set aside its internal differences, and continuing since then to emphasize civil-military harmony as central to both Pakistan’s defence and its economic turnaround.
That internal harmony has been tested by a war Pakistan has simultaneously been fighting on its western border. Even as it managed the India crisis, Pakistan spent 2025 and 2026 absorbing a dramatic rise in attacks from the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan, operating out of sanctuaries inside Afghanistan, with more than a thousand such attacks recorded in 2025 alone, among the worst years of militancy the country has seen in over a decade. Islamabad has consistently argued, and increasingly presented documented evidence, that this insurgency is fed by an emerging nexus between elements in Afghanistan and India, pointing to incidents such as Afghan forces launching coordinated attacks on Pakistani border posts and senior Afghan Taliban officials visiting India even as cross border violence escalated. Pakistan responded with operations such as Ghazab Lil Haq and Khyber Storm, targeting TTP infrastructure and leadership deep inside Afghanistan, while methodically laying out the alleged India-Afghan Taliban connection in briefings and international forums, arguing that groups identified as Fitna-al-Khwarij operate as Indian proxies.
Pakistan’s diplomatic reach beyond South Asia grew just as fast. President Trump hosted the army chief for a private lunch at the White House in June 2025, an unprecedented gesture, and has since called him his favourite field marshal. In September, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia signed a Strategic Mutual Defence Agreement committing each country to treat an attack on the other as an attack on itself, while a separate visit to Washington that same month produced a five hundred million dollar memorandum with a US firm to develop critical minerals in Balochistan. While India was hit with steep tariffs over its continued purchases of discounted Russian oil, Pakistan secured a comparatively favourable trade arrangement from the same US administration, a stark reversal of the India first tilt that had defined US South Asia policy for two decades.
When the United States and Iran drifted toward a second and more dangerous phase of confrontation, Pakistan positioned itself as a trusted intermediary to both sides, hosting technical talks and follow up rounds in Islamabad. Pakistan built this credibility by preserving its relationship with Tehran while still maintaining Washington’s confidence,demonstrating a powerful balancing act.
Pakistan spent the past month acting as a regional mediator and stabilizer. It played a visible role in US-Iran diplomacy, with talks in Switzerland and Doha and continued technical engagement under the Islamabad MoU, earning praise from R4 partners in Cairo. PM Shehbaz Sharif visited Iran and Türkiye to reinforce those ties. On India, Pakistan pushed back hard on the Indus Waters Treaty, warning against water “weaponization,” while also exchanging prisoner lists and rejecting Indian remarks on Kashmir. It raised Kashmir and Palestine jointly with China at the UN. On Afghanistan, it held counterterrorism talks with Russia even as border tensions flared after deadly airstrikes. Elsewhere, Pakistan deepened ties across the board, from President Zardari’s Kyrgyzstan visit to a new security MoU with Saudi Arabia, while marking the SCO’s anniversary and condemning Israeli actions against Palestinians.
It also spearheaded two pivotal initiatives that reinforced its role as a central convener. At the 9th OIC Ministerial Conference on Women, held in Islamabad, Pakistan brought together roughly 190 delegates from all 57 member states, secured the Islamabad Ministerial Declaration, and formally took over the chairmanship from Egypt. And at an international seminar on the Indus Waters Treaty, it enlisted foreign legal and water experts to argue India’s suspension of the treaty violates international law.Taken together, it was a month of crisis diplomacy, but also one where Pakistan turned bilateral friction into multilateral leverage, closing out the period in a stronger diplomatic position than it started.
Add up the disciplined messaging out of Islamabad, the leadership’s own diplomatic efforts and push for internal unity, the exposed Afghan-India nexus, and a genuine seat at the table from Riyadh to Washington to the Iran file, and the picture that emerges is unmistakable. Pakistan has become extremely relevant, maintaining functioning and often warm relationships across the Gulf, China, the United States, a list from which only India and Israel remain absent, for obvious reasons.
But none of these successes were achieved without a cost. Pakistan has steered itself through loss of lives, insurgency, martyrdoms, security risks, climate crisis, and economic uncertainty. Despite everything, Pakistan marches on.
