Despite endless chatter surrounding Pakistan’s role as mediator in the high stakes diplomatic row between the U.S. and Iran, this is certainly not the first time Pakistan has leaned into being the peacemaker.
In the lead up to the Geneva Accord of 1988, which led to the USSR’s retreat from Afghanistan and its eventual disintegration, Pakistan’s diplomacy and military strategy won the day hands down. Just as peace efforts are being led by Field Marshal Asim Munir today, another military man leveraged his extensive linguistic and geopolitical expertise as Pakistan’s foreign minister during complex Cold War negotiations 45 years ago.
The Brookings Institute, in an op-ed by Howard Schaffer and Teresita C. Schaffer, wrote about Sahibzada Yaqub Khan’s role on Jan. 29, 2016 after his demise: “Our first direct professional contact with Yaqub was on a mission where his presence was kept totally discreet. The Soviet army had just invaded Afghanistan, and the Pakistan foreign minister came to Washington to find out what support his country could expect from the U.S. government. Yaqub had just completed his long tenure as ambassador in Washington, but by the time of this mission he was Pakistan’s ambassador in Moscow, which made his presence extraordinarily sensitive. He asked the State Department to make sure he could enter and leave the building without being noticed. One of the Pakistan desk officers was assigned to pick him up at his hotel and bring him in through the basement garage. The desk officer’s car was a particularly ratty old Volkswagen Bug—a most unaccustomed chariot for this most elegant man. Yaqub didn’t bat an eyelash; his presence went publicly unremarked, and privately appreciated by both sides.”
The so-called quad comprising Egypt, Türkiye, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, overseeing back-channel diplomacy to wrangle back some semblance of peace to the region, has similarly operated in unison previously. During Yaqub’s six-year term as ambassador to Washington, from March 9-11, 1977, a splinter group of the Nation of Islam known as the Hanafi Movement took 149 men, women and children hostage in three different locations in Washington. In the 39-hour standoff a radio journalist and a police officer were killed.
The entire country was on tenterhooks as he, along with ambassador Ardeshir Zahedi of Iran and Egyptian envoy Dr. Ashraf Ghorbal, began negotiations with the 12 gunmen for the release of the hostages. Sahibzada Yaqub led the negotiations with the gunmen and offered himself as a hostage in return for the release of the captives. After many hours of difficult talks the hostages were released and then-president Jimmy Carter himself commented: “Ambassador Yaqub Khan had almost singlehandedly talked the Muslim group into peacefully surrendering the hostages.”
Pakistan’s diplomatic standards were once again put to the test with the invasion of Afghanistan by the USSR. Negotiations started in the summer of 1982 and finally, after 10 exhaustive rounds of negotiations in Geneva, an agreement seemed in the offing in 1988.
Yaqub, who led the Pakistan delegation, realized the fatal flaw in the process was that the Afghan resistance had not been invited. He staunchly believed the final round should not only result in the withdrawal of Soviet troops but should also yield a national government with the consent of all the Afghan parties or else there would be chaos. His warning went unheeded due to political wrangling back in Pakistan and he chose to resign rather than be the signatory to the peace deal he had helped broker. Robert Oakley, the U.S. ambassador to Pakistan from 1988 to 1991, was of the opinion that “the outcome of the Geneva Accords would have been different had Sahibzada Yabqub Khan been around.”
The endgame of the current U.S.-Iran quagmire is yet to be revealed but undeniably Pakistan’s mediation, historically tried and tested, will take the peace talks far. As for President Trump’s favorite Field Marshal, the Olympian heights he may scale remains to be seen.