Realpolitik and the Fallacy of Selective Moralism

The narrative that international diplomacy operates as a moral reward system is a persistent illusion.

A recent commentary by Mirza R. Ahmad, “Diplomacy Demands Credibility. Pakistan Has None to Spare,” published by Counterpoint (May 27, 2026), serves as a textbook example of this flawed analysis.

By evaluating the brutal, transactional arena of realpolitik through the lens of a historical report card, the piece exposes a fundamental misunderstanding of how global statecraft, crisis management, and regional deterrence actually function.

Ahmad’s core thesis -- that Pakistan’s domestic challenges and historical friction (and thus lacking so-called “neutrality”) disqualify it from acting as a diplomatic broker in Middle Eastern affairs -- is flawed at the outset. In the cold calculus of international relations, states do not select mediators based on moral purity or immaculate histories.

They choose them based on strategic utility, geographic positioning, and irreplaceable backchannels. When global or regional powers engage an intermediary, they are not issuing an endorsement of its past; they are leveraging its structural access.

The Realpolitik Framework

If an unblemished historical record were a prerequisite for diplomatic mediation, the international architecture would immediately freeze.

The United States would be barred from conflict resolution over its interventions in Bosnia-Serbia, Ukraine-Russia war and of course, conflict in Northern Ireland-United Kingdom; India would be disqualified due to ongoing transnational assassination controversies and its unilateral actions, not least systematic war crimes and state-sanctioned murders of both innocent lives and political opponents in Kashmir; and Qatar would never have been deemed a credible interlocutor for the US-Taliban peace accords.

Pakistan is consistently drawn into regional backchannels because it occupies an irreplaceable geographic pivot point. Sharing a 900-kilometer border with Iran, maintaining deep-rooted institutional security ties with Saudi Arabia, and acting as a critical corridor for Chinese strategic capital, Islamabad is a structural necessity.

The world engages with Pakistan because it has to, not because it seeks to litigate its domestic politics. In fact, it was Pakistan that arranged the backchannel diplomacy between the US and China in the 70s.

The Crucible of May 2025

Ahmad’s depiction of an isolated and strategically bankrupt actor is entirely invalidated by the realities of modern crisis management in South Asia. The most definitive test of a state’s geopolitical weight is its capacity to enforce stability under ultimate pressure. This was demonstrated during the May 2025 Four-Day Conflict, the most severe military confrontation between India and Pakistan in the 21st century.

Triggered by the April 22, 2025, Pahalgam attack, the crisis escalated sharply when New Delhi launched Operation Sindoor on May 7, attempting to normalize a doctrine of unilateral, cross-border conventional strikes under the nuclear shadow. The calculation -- predicated on the assumption that Pakistan’s internal political and economic friction would paralyze its response -- failed completely.

As defense scholar Dr. Rabia Akhtar observed in her definitive Belfer Center analysis, “Escalation Gone Meta: Strategic Lessons from the 2025 India-Pakistan Crisis,” (May 14, 2025) Islamabad did not resort to reckless nuclear signaling. Instead, it enforced a sophisticated doctrine of “Responsible Deterrence.” By utilizing conventional parity -- including advanced electronic warfare suites, precision short-range ballistic systems, and modern aerial interception -- Pakistan effectively neutralized India’s escalation ladder.

The strategic outcome was clear. As the New York Times explicitly concluded in its landmark May 18, 2025, evaluation: 

“India fought Pakistan to little more than a draw.”

By establishing conventional denial and compelling a US-brokered ceasefire via the DGMO hotline on May 10, Pakistan proved that its strategic posture remains the indispensable anchor of deterrence in the region. A state capable of absorbing an asymmetric conventional shock and enforcing structural equilibrium holds the ultimate form of systemic credibility.

Dismantling the Selective Historical Grievance List

To build his case, Ahmad relies on a highly curated, revisionist timeline. When re-examined with rigorous context, these historical citations do not withstand scrutiny:

The Kashmir Distortion: The piece frames the Kashmir dispute as a product of unprovoked Pakistani subversion in 1947. This entirely erases the indigenous Poonch Uprising against the Maharaja’s brutally oppressive rule and the documented communal massacres of Muslims in Jammu. More fundamentally, it ignores UN Security Council Resolution 47, which mandated a free and fair plebiscite.

India’s decades-long defiance of that democratic mandate remains the core driver of the dispute, a status worsened by New Delhi’s unilateral revocation of Article 370 in August 2019.

The Simla and Kargil Revisionism: While there could always be debate on whether the 1999 Kargil operation was tactical and political miscalculation by a specific military faction or not, but framing it as a unique violation of the 1972 Simla Agreement is both one-sided and distorts the historical facts surrounding the internationally-recognized disputed territory.

The narrative omits India’s Operation Meghdoot in 1984, in which the Indian military launched a surprise assault to permanently occupy the Siachen Glacier -- a massive, direct violation of the undemarcated Line of Control established by Simla. It seems the author either deliberately ignored this fact to peddle Indian narrative or is not cognizant of the regional history.

The Post-9/11 “Double Game” Scapegoat: The allegation that Pakistan simply milked Western aid while acting with duplicity serves as a convenient scapegoat for the West’s own nation-building failures in Afghanistan. The United States brought a destabilizing war to Pakistan’s doorstep.

In return, Pakistan paid an extraordinary price as a front-line state, absorbing over 80,000 deaths and roughly $126 billion in economic losses. Furthermore, historical data confirms that foundational tracking metadata initially provided by Pakistan’s ISI was precisely what enabled the CIA to map the courier network that ultimately led to Abbottabad.

When Pakistan was actively leading joint ISI-CIA operations to neutralize high-value Al-Qaeda targets -- frequently bypassing its own domestic judicial processes to hand over top-tier assets like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed -- the notion that Islamabad would execute a sudden, strategically suicidal pivot to shelter Bin Laden defies operational logic.

At the height of the Global War on Terror, with an overwhelming and pervasive CIA footprint inside Pakistan -- reinforcements actively invited by Islamabad to jointly collaborate to secure Pakistan’s own borders -- total concealment would have been impossible. Rather than a story of unilateral genius or structural duplicity, the timeline points to a far more cynical matrix of realpolitik.

For years, the protracted hunt served the institutional momentum of an expanding wartime bureaucracy in Washington. When the end-game arrived, the narrative of a purely ‘unilateral’ American raid provided a mutually convenient political theater.

It handed Washington a definitive, unshared victory while simultaneously offering Islamabad a critical ‘off-ramp’ -- preserving domestic stability by maintaining a veneer of plausible deniability, rather than forcing the state to publicly manage the explosive domestic blowback of a transparent hand-over.

The Nuclear Proliferation Anachronism: It is a bit rich to invoke the decades-old A.Q. Khan network to paint modern Pakistan as a “nuclear rogue” -- a sanctimonious phrase popularized by an India-appeasing, realpoliticking US Bush administration. This narrative conveniently suffers from selective amnesia.

It systematically ignores India’s own legacy of rogue nuclear technology assistance to Ba’athist Iraq -- which actively supported secessionist militants in Pakistan’s Balochistan province (where the BLA remains a designated terrorist entity in both Islamabad and Washington) -- and Vietnam.

The historical fact is that every nuclear-armed state in the postwar era, by hook or by crook, utilized what the West terms “illicit black markets” to secure existential deterrence. India is no exception, having famously used a black-market strategy to divert civilian nuclear technology and materials from Canada to build its first weapon. Similarly, Israel clandestinely partnered with white-ruled South Africa during the height of its genocidal apartheid regime.

What remains an undeniable historical reality -- acknowledged even by honest establishment figures in New Delhi -- is that Pakistan’s pursuit of the asset was a purely reactionary, defensive response to India’s nuclearization in the 1970s. Facing an existential crisis after being truncated in the 1971 war, Pakistan did exactly what any middle power confronting a hostile, larger neighbor would do: it prioritized national survival over international legal regimes.

When a state faces an existential threat, the overriding constitutional factor is security. Nothing is “rogue” when it comes to preserving the state. The contemporary tragedy of Ukraine -- which gave up its nuclear arsenal only to face territorial dismemberment -- and the illegal external aggression brought against Iran after February 28, 2026, completely vindicate this logic.

Furthermore, the emergence of alternative procurement channels was an unintended consequence of Western policy itself. By slapping Pakistan with hard-hitting sanctions in 1998 and refusing to share the defensive medium-range ballistic missile (MRBM) technology required to counter Indian belligerence, the West deliberately cornered its own ally.

This blockade forced Islamabad to seek financial and technological assistance from alternative providers willing to deal on a transactional basis. The resulting network was the entirely predictable byproduct of Western denial -- a structural blind spot that allowed Washington to maintain a shield of plausible deniability regarding the changing strategic balance in South Asia while avoiding direct friction with New Delhi. It is naive to assume a nation facing annihilation would simply sit idly by.

In any case, that era is long gone. The illicit network was aggressively dismantled by the state more than twenty years ago with the explicit nod of the United States. Today, Pakistan’s Strategic Plans Division (SPD) manages a command-and-control apparatus so stringent that the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) routinely recognizes its safety and regulatory compliance.

Pakistan’s refusal to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) exactly mirrors India’s -- a calculated security necessity to maintain a permanent deterrent against an asymmetric neighbor. Period.

The Middle Eastern Reality Check

The Ahmad piece reaches its peak analytical inconsistency when arguing that Pakistan’s non-recognition of Israel -- a state that is indicted by ICJ for plausible genocide and whose leaders served with ICC arrest warrants for war crimes -- and its close alignment with Saudi Arabia disqualify it from Middle Eastern diplomacy. This completely misreads the mechanics of Gulf diplomacy.

Pakistan’s refusal to recognize Israel -- a stance strictly aligned with the consensus of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) and international legal frameworks regarding a two-state solution  -- is precisely what preserves its operational utility with Tehran.

Ironically, while Mirza R. Ahmad calls for a sympathetic tone toward a Zionist, ethno-supremacist, settler-colonial state whose genocide of Palestinians has been live-streamed to the world, he raises the historical trauma of Pakistan’s war crimes, reported rapes, and genocide of Bengalis in erstwhile East Pakistan to disqualify Islamabad from regional statecraft.

If we are to accept his premise that genocide is the heinous “mother of all crimes,” his analytical conclusion is entirely inverted. It is precisely because of the profound horrors of the 1971 war that Pakistan must never appease, legitimize, or embolden a genocide-waging, mass-raping Zionist state -- least of all Israel in its current manifestation as a genocide-waging, Nazist-Zionist colonial occupier.

Furthermore, the sincerity of advocates like Ahmad and the contemporary Bangladeshi establishment is entirely compromised by their absolute reticence to ever demand a UN-commissioned inquiry or a UN-led ICC war crimes tribunal to investigate the 1971 conflict.

Their lack of seriousness is telling: they dare not call for a genuine international judicial body because an independent tribunal would be mandated to investigate the war crimes committed by all sides, utterly shattering their sanitized narrative of victor’s justice.

A real international investigation would force them to confront the documented atrocities, massacres, and mass rapes committed by Bengali nationalists, armed mobs, and the Indian-backed Mukti Bahini against the ethnic Bihari Muslim community, who were collectively targeted for their perceived loyalty to the state.

The historical timeline is clear: In early March 1971 -- weeks before the Pakistani military’s Operation Searchlight even commenced -- widespread ethnic rioting saw over 300 Biharis slaughtered by Bengali mobs in Chittagong alone. While the total casualties remain fiercely contested -- with Bihari representatives in June 1971 claiming figures as high as 500,000 -- the absolute silence and refusal of the Bangladeshi establishment to seek international judicial accountability exposes a calculated double standard.

By completely omitting the crimes committed under the shadow of the Indian Army’s regional command, Ahmad reveals that his interest lies not in universal justice, but in maintaining a highly curated narrative of selective grievance.

When regional proxy wars threaten to destabilize the wider Persian Gulf, Pakistan’s balanced, non-aligned posture becomes an indispensable firebreak. Islamabad is one of the exceptionally few capitals that can maintain a deep, institutional defense partnership with Saudi Arabia while simultaneously keeping an open, trusted bilateral channel with its contiguous neighbor, Iran.

This exact matrix of managed deniability and strategic necessity is unfolding in real-time today, bringing the transactional relationship between Islamabad and Washington completely full circle. Following the explosive outbreak of the US-Iran war on February 28 and the subsequent bottlenecking of global energy markets, Washington found itself facing an unmanageable escalation ladder.

In a striking display of historical reciprocity, Pakistan is currently constructing a vital diplomatic exit for the US. Just as Washington engineered a highly calculated “off-ramp” for Islamabad in the wake of the 2011 Abbottabad raid to preserve Pakistan’s internal stability, Pakistan has reciprocated by providing the face-saving architecture required to wind down a volatile regional war.

By leveraging its unique, trusted bilateral conduit to Tehran, Pakistani leadership successfully brokered the April 8 ceasefire and erected the framework for the high-stakes Islamabad Peace Talks.

When regional escalation threatens to spill over, the Gulf monarchies and Western powers do not look to external actors shackled by their own domestic majoritarian politics to act as arbiters; they rely on Pakistan’s unique position as a nuclear-armed, geographically vital state with deep institutional memory in crisis management. Credibility in the international system is measured entirely by who can build your exit strategy.

Reality Over Rhetoric

Mirza R. Ahmad’s commentary falls into the classic trap of superficial internationalism by assuming that global diplomacy operates as a moral report card issued by legacy commentators. In reality, when conflicting great powers seek a third-party mediator, the only track record that carries functional weight is whether that state has proven itself unyielding and uncompromising on its own national security; a nation that compromises during its own existential crises lacks the strategic gravity to broker the survival of others.

Pakistan’s irreplaceable role as a global diplomatic anchor is driven by three ironclad pillars of realpolitik: Its demonstrated capacity to enforce strategic equilibrium by neutralizing external hegemony -- as seen in its conventional deterrence during the May 2025 Four-Day Conflict; its defensive realism through a sophisticated nuclear apparatus born from the existential trauma of 1971, which stands entirely vindicated in a world where Ukraine was dismembered after disarming and Iran faced illegal Western aggression after February 28, 2026; and its transactional indispensability in holding open trusted conduits to construct face-saving “off-ramps” for superpowers trapped in regional quagmires, a reality currently dictated by the 2026 Islamabad Peace Talks.

Ultimately, the Ahmad thesis suffers from a profound analytical and moral obsolescence because true credibility in global statecraft is measured by an unflinching, uncompromising commitment to the sacrosanct viability of a state’s sovereignty and its very existence as a federal nation of communities.

Despite deep domestic flaws, historical traumas, and fragile democratic transitions, it is from this very steadfastness -- the absolute refusal to break in the face of hostile power -- that nations like Pakistan, and indeed Bangladesh and others, can draw both their moral and strategic strength.

In the brutal, transactional mechanics of international survival, Pakistan does not need to plead for a seat at the diplomatic table; the raw architecture of global crises ensures that the table cannot be built without it. Period.

Ismail Y Syed is a London-based columnist and advises governments and NGOs on geopolitical risk.