The Ummah Trap:
Pakistan, Iran, and the War Nobody Wants to Actually Fight

Twenty-two people died on Pakistani streets in the first seventy-two hours after Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was killed in US-Israeli strikes on February 28, 2026. Ten in Karachi, where a crowd rushed the American Consulate on Mai Kolachi Road, smashed its windows, and was met with tear gas and gunfire. Two in Islamabad, where thousands massed near the Red Zone holding photographs of a man most of them could not have named five years ago. In Gilgit and Skardu, the army imposed curfews after protesters attacked UN offices, burned a police station, and damaged schools. Interior Minister Mohsin Naqvi went on camera to plead for calm, calling it "a sorrowful day for the entire Muslim Ummah." The grief was visible. The anger was enormous. And within that anger lived a demand — spoken aloud in placards, in chants, in the tears of a twenty-eight-year-old woman named Nayab Zehra who told Al Jazeera she had come because "our government is not with you." The demand was for Pakistan to do something. To stand up. To fight.

This article takes that demand seriously. It takes the grief seriously. And it attempts, with the care that the subject requires, to answer the question that the demand contains — by examining not the emotion, which is legitimate, but the history, the strategic realities, the bilateral record, and the nature of the regime whose leader's death produced this convulsion. Because if Pakistan is going to be asked to risk its existence for another state, its citizens deserve to know what that state has actually done for them, what its leader actually believed about them, and what the consequences of that risk would actually look like.

The Rage on the Streets: Where the Feeling Comes From

The emotional response to Khamenei's assassination was not manufactured, and anyone who dismisses it as mere sectarian agitation is not paying attention. It came from several deep wells simultaneously.

The first is Palestine. Since October 2023, Pakistanis — like hundreds of millions of people across the Muslim world and beyond — have watched the devastation of Gaza with a horror that has only deepened with time. The Israeli campaign in Gaza, followed by the strikes on Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, and then Iran, created a cumulative sense that the Muslim world was under a coordinated assault and that nobody with power was doing anything to stop it. Iran, whatever its flaws, was the only state-level actor that appeared to be fighting back. Its "Axis of Resistance" — Hezbollah, Hamas, the Houthis — had, in the eyes of millions, done what sixty years of Arab summit communiqués had not: put Israeli territory under fire. When that axis was systematically dismantled and its patron state was bombed, the emotional logic was straightforward. The one country that fought is being destroyed. And we are watching.

The second source is anti-Americanism — and it did not arrive from nowhere. It was built, grievance by grievance, over decades of American actions that treated Pakistan as an instrument to be used and discarded. Start with the post-9/11 ultimatum. When George W. Bush told the world "you are either with us or against us," Pakistan's military dictator Pervez Musharraf was given a phone call by Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage that, by Musharraf's own account, threatened to bomb Pakistan "back to the Stone Age" if it did not cooperate. Pakistan cooperated. It opened its airspace. It provided logistics, bases, and intelligence. It lost over 80,000 citizens and soldiers to the war on terror that followed. The United States, when it was finished, negotiated directly with the Taliban — the enemy Pakistan had been told to destroy — and left.

Then came the drone campaigns: thousands of strikes in the tribal areas, killing militants and civilians alike, conducted without Pakistani consent on Pakistani soil, with the CIA treating the country's sovereign territory as a free-fire zone. The Raymond Davis affair in 2011, when a CIA contractor shot two Pakistanis dead in broad daylight in Lahore and was extracted under diplomatic immunity, confirmed for millions that American operatives moved through Pakistan with impunity and without consequence. The unilateral Abbottabad raid — conducted without informing Pakistan's military that US special forces were flying helicopters into the heart of the country — was experienced not as a triumph of counter-terrorism but as a humiliation: either Pakistan's military was complicit and had been lying, or it was incompetent and had been bypassed. Neither reading was flattering. Neither was forgiven.

And then there was the vaccination programme. In the hunt for Osama bin Laden, the CIA ran a fake hepatitis B vaccination campaign in Abbottabad, using a Pakistani doctor — Shakil Afridi — to collect DNA samples from the compound's residents. When the operation was exposed, it did not merely embarrass a spy agency. It destroyed public trust in vaccination programmes across Pakistan for years afterward. Health workers — real ones, delivering real polio vaccines to real children — were subsequently murdered by militants who told communities that the vaccinators were CIA spies. The CIA's operation did not just find bin Laden. It gave armed groups a credible reason to kill health workers, and it gave millions of Pakistani parents a reason to refuse vaccines for their children. The poliovirus is still circulating in Pakistan. Part of the reason is a CIA operation that weaponized public health for intelligence purposes and left Pakistan to deal with the consequences.

Add to this the Pressler Amendment sanctions of the 1990s — which cut off military aid to Pakistan after it had served its purpose in the anti-Soviet jihad — and the broader perception that Washington reflexively sides with India, and the picture is complete. When the US joined Israel in striking Iranian nuclear facilities in June 2025, and again in February 2026, it confirmed — for many Pakistanis — everything they already believed about American intentions toward the Muslim world. The Consulate attack in Karachi was not unprecedented. In November 1979, a crowd burned the US Embassy in Islamabad to the ground after Khomeini broadcast a false claim that America and Israel were behind the seizure of the Grand Mosque in Mecca. The structural resentment has not changed in forty-seven years. What has changed is that there are now four more decades of evidence to sustain it.

The third source, and this must be stated with care, is sectarian identity. The protests in Gilgit-Baltistan and parts of Karachi were overwhelmingly Shia in composition. Nayab Zehra's own words were revealing: "We want to show the world that, don't take us Shia lightly. We will seek revenge. We cannot expect or hope anything from our own government." The Shia community in Pakistan — roughly fifteen to twenty percent of the population — has a relationship with Iran that the Sunni majority does not share. For many Pakistani Shia, Khamenei was not merely a geopolitical actor. He was the symbolic head of their branch of Islam, the inheritor of a tradition that traces its authority through the line of the Prophet's family. His killing felt personal in a way that it did not — and could not — feel for the majority of Pakistanis.

These three currents — solidarity with Palestine, anti-Americanism, and Shia communal grief — converged into a single overwhelming demand: Pakistan must act. But the demand, in its rawness, elides the question that matters most. Act how? Against whom? At what cost? And on behalf of what, exactly?

The Question Nobody Is Answering: What Does "Standing with Iran" Actually Mean?

Strip the slogans down to their operational content and the demand has only one logical conclusion: direct Pakistani military engagement against the United States and Israel in defense of the Islamic Republic of Iran. Everything short of that — the condemnations, the UN statements, the OIC resolutions, the phone calls between foreign ministers — is precisely what Pakistan already did. And those who call it cowardice are, by elimination, calling for war.

So let us take the demand at its word and ask what that war would look like.

This is not defeatism. It is arithmetic. And before the objection forms — "Iran fought despite being weaker, so courage is what matters" — consider what happened to Iran when it fought. Its top generals were killed in the opening hours. Its nuclear facilities were struck. Its air defenses were destroyed. Its emergency command bunkers were hit with such precision that Israeli intelligence clearly knew where every senior official was sitting. Its foreign minister's car was chased by drones as he tried to flee to Turkey. Its Supreme Leader was assassinated. Its economy, already crippled by sanctions, now faces reconstruction costs in the tens of billions. Iran fought. Iran was brave. And Iran was devastated. The argument for courage is not an argument for capability. Pakistan watched in real time what "fighting back" against the United States and Israel actually looks like when you do not have the military, economic, or intelligence infrastructure to sustain it. That is not a lesson to admire from a distance. It is a warning.

The next objection will come in the language of dignity: it is better to die on your feet than to live on your knees. This is perhaps the most powerful argument in the arsenal of those who want Pakistan to fight, because it appeals not to strategy but to honour — and honour is a currency that runs deep in Pakistani culture, deeper than economics, deeper sometimes than survival. The phrase demands respect. It also demands scrutiny.

Because the framing contains a lie. It presents two options — die standing or live kneeling — and pretends there is no third. But there is a third. It is: live on your feet. And that is the option that the rhetoric of glorious sacrifice is designed to make you forget.

Living on your feet means building a Pakistan whose economy is not hostage to IMF conditionalities — so that no American official can collapse your currency with a phone call. It means building indigenous defense industries so advanced that the threat of sanctions loses its leverage. It means educating your population so thoroughly that your scientists, your engineers, your strategists cannot be bought, intimidated, or assassinated into irrelevance. It means building the kind of state that China built — not by fighting the United States in 1970 when it was weak, but by spending forty years becoming so strong that confrontation became unnecessary because nobody could afford the cost of imposing their will on Beijing. China did not die on its feet. It did not live on its knees. It stood up by building — factories, universities, missiles, institutions — until the world had no choice but to deal with it as an equal. That is what living on your feet looks like. It is slower than a martyrdom operation. It is less satisfying on social media. And it is the only version of standing up that your children survive.

Iran chose the other path. It poured resources into Hezbollah, into Hamas, into the Houthis, into a regional resistance architecture that was, in its own terms, genuinely brave. And in June 2025, that entire architecture was dismantled in twelve days. Hezbollah's command structure had already been liquidated. Hamas was bleeding in Gaza. The Houthis were under bombardment. And Iran itself was struck with a precision that revealed decades of intelligence penetration. The courage was real. The strategy failed. Iran is not standing on its feet today. It is lying in rubble, leaderless, with its nuclear programme set back by years, its military decapitated, and its people facing a reconstruction bill that will take a generation to pay. The question is not whether it is noble to resist. The question is whether resistance that leads to destruction is resistance at all — or whether it is a performance of resistance whose audience is history and whose cost is paid by the living.

Pakistan cannot afford that performance. Not because Pakistanis lack courage — the men who fought at Saragarha, the pilots who flew in 1965, the soldiers who held the line against India in May 2025 did not lack courage. But because courage without a functioning state behind it is just another way of dying. And Pakistan's 250 million people deserve better than to be extras in someone else's epic.

The protesters in Karachi were not wrong to be angry. But the people encouraging them to believe that Pakistan can fight the United States — whether those people are on social media, on television, or in the paid employment of foreign intelligence services — are lying to them. They are spending Pakistani blood to purchase a feeling. The bill arrives the morning after, and it arrives in Lahore and Quetta and Peshawar, not in Tehran or Washington.

When Iran's IRGC General Mohsen Rezaee went on Iranian state television in June 2025 and claimed that Pakistan had assured Iran it would use nuclear weapons against Israel on Iran's behalf, Pakistan's defense minister immediately and publicly denied it. The denial was not weakness. It was a country recognizing — at the highest levels of its military — that being drawn into someone else's war on terms dictated by someone else's propaganda apparatus is the fastest route to national destruction. Iran was happy to volunteer Pakistan's nuclear arsenal on live television. It did not ask Pakistan first.

The Ayatollah You Think You Know

Before Pakistan mourns a leader, it should know who it is mourning. And knowing requires honesty in both directions — about what Khamenei did that earned genuine admiration, and about what he did that does not survive scrutiny.

The case for Khamenei, stated at its strongest: he was the only head of state in the Muslim world who built and sustained a military architecture that actually confronted Israel. Not with communiqués. Not with "grave concern." With rockets, with proxies, with a strategic doctrine that put Israeli territory under threat for the first time since 1973. Hezbollah, which Iran funded and armed, forced Israel's withdrawal from southern Lebanon in 2000 — the first time an Arab force had compelled an Israeli retreat. Hamas, whatever one thinks of its methods, was sustained by Iranian support at a time when the Arab states were normalizing relations with Tel Aviv. The Houthis disrupted global shipping in the Red Sea to pressure Israel over Gaza. No other Muslim state — not Saudi Arabia, not Turkey, not Pakistan — did any of this. Iran alone put its money, its soldiers, and eventually its cities on the line. For millions of Muslims, including millions of Sunnis, this was not sectarian politics. It was the only resistance that existed. That feeling is real, and this article does not dismiss it.

Khamenei also made gestures toward Islamic unity that should be acknowledged. In 2010, he issued a fatwa prohibiting Shia Muslims from insulting the companions of the Prophet — figures sacred to Sunni Islam. The fatwa was widely praised across the Muslim world, including by scholars at Al-Azhar in Cairo. He consistently framed Iran's foreign policy in pan-Islamic rather than purely Shia terms, and his support for Hamas — a Sunni Palestinian movement — lent credibility to that framing. These were not empty gestures. They reflected a genuine strategic vision of Muslim solidarity against Israel, even if the domestic reality inside Iran told a different story.

That domestic reality is what requires examination.

Khamenei ruled Iran for thirty-six years. He was not elected to the position of Supreme Leader by popular vote. He was chosen by the Assembly of Experts — a clerical body — after the death of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in 1989. At the time of his appointment, he held a clerical rank below what the constitution required for the role. The constitution was subsequently amended to accommodate him. This is not an attack on Shia clerical authority — it is a documented fact about the political process that brought one particular cleric to power. The question it raises is not theological but political: was Khamenei chosen because he was the most qualified religious authority, or because he was the most useful to the political establishment that selected him? Iranian scholars have debated this for decades. The answer matters, because the authority Khamenei exercised over 90 million Iranians — and claimed, symbolically, over the global Shia community — rested on that appointment.

His record over those thirty-six years is a matter of public documentation, not opinion.

On His Own People

A fair reading of Khamenei's domestic record requires honesty about two things simultaneously: that the Iranian state faced genuine security threats — including documented Mossad penetration so deep that the head of Iran's own counter-intelligence unit turned out to be an Israeli asset — and that the regime's response to internal dissent went far beyond what any security threat could justify. Both things are true. Acknowledging one does not erase the other.

Iran experienced waves of mass protest under Khamenei — in 2009 after disputed elections, in 2017-18 over economic conditions, in 2019 over fuel prices, in 2022 after the death of Mahsa Amini in morality police custody, and again in January 2026 in the weeks before Khamenei's death. The exact casualty figures from these crackdowns are contested. Western human rights organisations cite numbers in the hundreds for individual episodes; Iranian state media disputes them; independent verification inside a closed security state is inherently difficult. What is not contested — because it is visible in the footage, the testimonies, and the regime's own public statements — is that security forces used lethal force against unarmed protesters on a systematic and recurring basis. Amnesty International's figure of at least 304 killed in the 2019 protests alone is based on individual case documentation, not estimates. During the January 2026 unrest, casualty claims vary enormously depending on the source — some Western outlets citing figures in the tens of thousands, Iranian state media acknowledging far fewer. The truth is almost certainly somewhere in between, and no honest analyst can cite a precise number with confidence.

What can be said with confidence is this: across these episodes, the protesters were overwhelmingly ordinary Iranians — not foreign agents, not Mossad operatives, not regime change pawns. They were workers protesting inflation. Students demanding political openness. Women refusing to accept state control over their bodies. Many of them chanted "Death to the dictator" — and they meant Khamenei. Some of them were undoubtedly influenced by foreign information operations; Iran's own intelligence services have documented this, and given what we now know about the depth of Israeli penetration, the claim is credible.

And here, a necessary detour — because the most common rebuttal to any criticism of Iran's domestic conditions is that the West caused them. The sanctions did it. American and European economic warfare strangled Iran's economy, created the inflation, caused the unemployment, and the protests were therefore a product of deliberate external destabilization, not of governance failure. This argument is partially true and must be taken seriously. The sanctions regime imposed on Iran — particularly after the US withdrew from the JCPOA in 2018 — was devastating, deliberately designed to cripple Iran's oil revenues, cut it off from the international banking system, and make daily life unbearable for ordinary Iranians. The human cost was real and enormous. Medicine shortages, currency collapse, inflation that hit forty percent — these were not accidents. They were policy objectives of the United States and its allies. Anyone who discusses Iranian economic suffering without naming sanctions as a primary cause is being dishonest.

But the argument has a limit, and it is important to locate it precisely. Sanctions explain economic pain. They do not explain why a state responds to economic protests by shooting into crowds. South Korea under Park Chung-hee faced crippling economic conditions. Cuba has been under sanctions for sixty years. Neither responded to popular unrest by killing thousands of its own citizens in the streets in a matter of days. The decision to use lethal force against unarmed protesters is a governance choice, not an economic inevitability. Iran's security forces did not open fire because sanctions left them no alternative. They opened fire because the regime's model of authority — absolute clerical guardianship, with no legitimate mechanism for dissent — left it no response to popular anger except suppression. Sanctions created the pressure. The regime chose the valve. Those are different responsibilities, and conflating them serves the interests of both Washington and Tehran while obscuring the experience of the Iranians who actually died.

The grievances themselves — economic desperation, political repression, lack of personal freedoms — were real, domestic, and longstanding, even if their intensity was amplified by external pressure. You do not need Mossad to explain why people living under those conditions take to the streets. The kindling was Iranian. The sanctions were accelerant. Whether or not someone else lit a match does not change the nature of the fuel — or excuse the fire brigade for turning its hoses into flamethrowers.

But even the sanctions argument must be followed to its conclusion rather than abandoned at the convenient point. Sanctions crushed Iran's economy. That is established. The question is what Khamenei's government did with the resources it still controlled. Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps — answerable directly to the Supreme Leader, not to parliament — ran a sprawling economic empire: construction firms, telecommunications companies, import-export operations, oil and gas subsidiaries. The IRGC's conglomerates were estimated to control between a quarter and a third of Iran's economy. The bonyads — religious foundations under Khamenei's direct authority — controlled additional billions in assets, largely exempt from parliamentary oversight or public audit. Sanctions made Iran poorer. But the regime's own structure ensured that the pain was distributed downward, to the workers and the students and the women, while the institutions closest to the Supreme Leader remained funded, fed, and armed. Pakistanis, of all people, should recognize this pattern — it is the same one the IMF's 2025 Governance Diagnostic described in Pakistan itself: a state where crisis is socialized and privilege is privatized. Iran's sanctions were real. Iran's corruption in distributing the remaining wealth was also real. Both are true. The protesters knew the difference — which is why they chanted against Khamenei, not against Washington.

On Women

Khamenei's position on women's rights was not ambiguous. He imposed compulsory hijab as state law, enforced by morality police with the power to arrest, fine, and imprison. He described gender equality as a Western imposition — in his words, a project with Zionist origins designed to corrupt women's societal role. In 2017, he issued a fatwa banning women from riding bicycles in public. These are not allegations from hostile foreign media. They are his own public statements and official religious rulings.

Now — a Pakistani reader may reasonably ask: is this different from the conservatism that exists in parts of Pakistani society? Is the West applying a standard to Iran that it does not apply to its own allies? These are fair questions. Saudi Arabia only lifted its ban on women driving in 2018. Pakistan's own record on women's rights is far from exemplary. And yes — there is a real and documented Western hypocrisy in selectively weaponizing women's rights to delegitimize Muslim-majority governments while tolerating identical practices in allied states. That hypocrisy exists. It is worth naming. But naming it does not make the underlying facts about Iran disappear.

Consider a closer comparison that cuts through the geopolitics entirely. Pakistan — its government, its media, its religious scholars across the sectarian spectrum — has been vocal in condemning the Afghan Taliban's treatment of women. The banning of girls from secondary school. The prohibition on women working. The erasure of women from public life. These condemnations are not framed as Western propaganda when they come from Pakistani pulpits. They are framed as violations of Islamic values — because most Pakistani scholars, Sunni and Shia, agree that Islam does not mandate what the Taliban impose. The Iranian system operated on the same continuum. Women were not merely encouraged to dress modestly — they were surveilled, arrested, beaten, and in some documented cases killed for the crime of choosing what to wear. The morality police who dragged Mahsa Amini into a van were not substantively different from the Taliban's Amr bil Maroof enforcers. They were better dressed and operated in a country with a seat at the United Nations, but the logic was identical: the state owns women's bodies, and disobedience is a criminal act.

If Pakistan condemns that logic when it wears a Taliban turban, it cannot exempt it when it wears an ayatollah's robe. The principle is either universal or it is decoration. And the question of whether a state should kill its own women for demanding a choice is not a question of cultural values or Western interference. It is a question of governance. On that question, Khamenei's record speaks for itself — in his own fatwas, his own security forces' actions, and the courage of the Iranian women who defied him knowing the cost.

On Sunni Muslims — Pakistan's Majority Faith

This is the chapter that the people marching for Khamenei in Lahore and Islamabad need most to read.

Iran's constitution establishes Twelver Shia Islam as the official state religion under Article 12. Article 115 restricts the presidency — and by extension all senior positions — exclusively to Twelver Shia. Sunni Muslims, who comprise roughly five to ten percent of Iran's population, are constitutionally barred from holding the highest offices in the country. They cannot become Supreme Leader. They cannot become President. They are effectively excluded from senior military, judicial, and intelligence positions.

Khamenei did issue a fatwa in 2010 prohibiting Shia Muslims from insulting the companions of the Prophet — figures revered by Sunnis. He called for an end to discrimination against Sunnis in 2017. Both gestures were widely praised. Both remained almost entirely unenforced. Molavi Abdul Hamid himself noted that previous directives regarding Sunni rights had not been implemented by parliament, the judiciary, or the armed forces. The words were for export. The reality was domestic.

The man for whom Pakistanis burned police stations in Gilgit presided over a state that constitutionally prohibited their sect from holding power. That is not a polemical argument. It is Article 115 of the Iranian constitution.

A Brotherhood of Convenience: Iran and Pakistan Since 1947

The narrative of eternal Iranian-Pakistani brotherhood is a diplomatic courtesy, not a historical fact. The actual record is a pendulum of alignment and betrayal driven entirely by strategic convenience on both sides.

• 1947 — A Genuine Beginning Iran was the first country to recognize Pakistan's independence. The gesture was meaningful. Through the 1950s and 1960s, under the Shah, both countries were part of the Western-aligned CENTO alliance. Iran provided Pakistan with fuel and weapons at preferential prices during the 1965 war with India. This was the high-water mark of the relationship — and it was built entirely on shared Cold War alignment, not religious solidarity.
• 1971 — The First Cracks After Pakistan's catastrophic defeat and the loss of East Bengal, the Shah reoriented Iran's foreign policy toward a closer relationship with India, viewing New Delhi as the emerging regional power. Pakistan, feeling abandoned, turned increasingly toward the Arab Gulf states — particularly Saudi Arabia — for financial and diplomatic support. The divergence was structural and has never fully reversed.
• 1979 — The Revolution Changes Everything Khomeini's Islamic Revolution replaced a pro-American monarchy with a virulently anti-American theocracy. Pakistan was the first state to recognize the new government — a gesture that Iran has frequently invoked but rarely reciprocated in practice. The revolution's emphasis on exporting Shia political Islam created immediate friction with Pakistan's Sunni-majority population and its deepening alliance with Saudi Arabia.
• 1980s — The Sectarian Wound Opens As General Zia ul-Haq imposed his Sunni-inflected Islamization programme across Pakistan, Iran began funding Shia institutions and organizations inside Pakistan as a countermeasure. Saudi Arabia responded by pouring money into Sunni madrassas and militant organizations. Pakistan became the battlefield for a Saudi-Iranian proxy war that produced groups like Sipah-e-Sahaba and Sipah-e-Muhammad, the first generation of organized sectarian killers. Thousands of Pakistani Shia and Sunni died in the violence that followed — violence that was, in significant part, a product of Iranian and Saudi interference in Pakistani society.
• 1990s — Afghanistan Drives Them Apart When the Afghan civil war produced the Taliban, Pakistan backed them. Iran backed the Northern Alliance. The two countries found themselves on opposite sides of a conflict that would define the region for the next three decades. When the Taliban took Mazar-i-Sharif in 1998 and killed eleven Iranian diplomats, relations came to the brink of war — with Pakistan implicated as the Taliban's primary sponsor.
• 1994 — Iran Shields India at the OIC When Pakistan attempted to push an anti-India resolution on Kashmir through the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation, Iran was the only member state to refuse to back it. Tehran actively shielded New Delhi from international censure at the one forum where Pakistan had the most leverage on Kashmir. The message was unmistakable: Iran's relationship with India took precedence over Islamic solidarity with Pakistan on the issue Pakistan considers most existential.
• 2024 — Chabahar: The Port Built to Bypass Pakistan In May 2024, Iran signed a ten-year agreement with India to develop the Chabahar Port — a project explicitly designed to give India direct access to Afghanistan and Central Asia without transiting through Pakistan. The strategic implications are devastating for Islamabad: Pakistan's geographic leverage as the transit state between South Asia and Central Asia is directly undermined by its supposed brother's infrastructure deal with its primary adversary.

This is the brotherhood. Real diplomatic history, not Friday sermon rhetoric. A relationship in which Iran armed Pakistan's sectarian killers, sided with Pakistan's enemies at international forums, built India a port to circumvent Pakistani territory, and backed the opposite side in every Afghan war. The friendship is real — in the same way that all geopolitical relationships are real: as a function of overlapping interests that appear and disappear depending on the decade.

January 2024: When Iran Bombed Pakistan

Sixteen months before Pakistani citizens stormed the American Consulate over Khamenei's death, Iran fired missiles and drones into Pakistani territory and killed two Pakistani children.

On January 16, 2024, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps launched strikes on the village of Koh-e-Sabz in Panjgur District, Balochistan, claiming to target the Sunni militant group Jaish al-Adl. Two girls — aged eight and twelve — were killed. A mosque was hit. The attack came on the same day that Pakistan's caretaker Prime Minister was meeting Iran's Foreign Minister on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum in Davos. On the same day that Pakistani and Iranian navies were conducting joint exercises in the Persian Gulf.

Pakistan condemned the strikes as "an unprovoked violation of its airspace" and recalled its ambassador from Tehran. Two days later, Pakistan launched retaliatory strikes — Operation Marg Bar Sarmachar — using F-16s, JF-17s, drones, and multiple rocket launchers to hit Baloch militant hideouts roughly twenty kilometers inside Iranian territory.

The episode revealed the fundamental asymmetry in how Iran views Pakistan. Tehran treats Pakistani sovereignty as negotiable — a cost it is willing to impose when it needs to make a point — while expecting Pakistani solidarity to be unconditional. Iran apologized to no one. It offered no compensation for the dead children. It did not even acknowledge the possibility that it had done something wrong. It simply moved on, confident that Pakistan's need for the relationship would outlast Pakistan's anger.

And it was right. Within weeks, ambassadors were exchanged and diplomatic language returned to normal. The children in Koh-e-Sabz remained dead.

Where Was Tehran When Islamabad Needed It?

If the Ummah demands that Pakistan risk itself for Iran, then the Ummah should be asked: what has Iran risked for Pakistan?

In May 2025, India launched Operation Sindoor — missile and air strikes on nine sites across Pakistan, the heaviest military exchange between the two nuclear powers since 1971. Pakistani civilians died. Infrastructure was damaged. The country was, for four days, on the edge of a nuclear escalation that the entire world watched with terror.

Iran's response was to offer mediation. A defender of Tehran will argue — fairly — that mediation is itself a form of support. It costs political capital. It signals that Iran cares enough to involve itself. Araghchi's visit to Islamabad was the first by any foreign dignitary after tensions erupted, and that matters. Iran also offered to mediate before the conflict escalated to strikes, which suggests genuine concern, not mere posturing. This should be acknowledged.

But mediation is the posture of a neutral party — a country maintaining relationships with both sides. Araghchi visited Islamabad and New Delhi with equal diplomatic courtesy. Tehran positioned itself as an honest broker, not as Pakistan's ally. Compare that to the language Pakistan deployed when Iran was struck: "unjustified and illegitimate aggression," "resolute solidarity," parliamentary sessions, closed borders, scrambled jets. Pakistan did not offer to mediate between Iran and Israel. It took a side. It took Iran's side. The question is whether Iran would ever return that favour — and the evidence from May 2025 says the answer is no. Not because Iran is malicious, but because India is too valuable a partner for Tehran to alienate over Pakistan's wars. That is a rational choice. But rationality cuts both ways.

It goes further back. Iran shielded India from censure at the OIC on Kashmir — the single issue on which Pakistan most desperately needed Islamic solidarity. Iran built India a port designed to bypass Pakistani territory. Iran maintained cordial intelligence relationships with India throughout the very decades in which it was supposedly Pakistan's Muslim brother. Iran's diplomatic and strategic behavior toward India has been consistently, measurably, and documentably warmer than its behavior toward Pakistan on every issue except the one where Pakistan's cooperation directly served Iranian interests: border security in Balochistan.

Iran wants Pakistan's loyalty. It does not offer its own in return. This is not a partnership. It is a subscription that only one side pays for.

The Sectarian Fault Line Nobody Wants to Name

The protests in Pakistan after Khamenei's death were not uniform. The largest and most intense demonstrations occurred in Shia-majority areas — Gilgit-Baltistan, parts of Karachi, pockets of Islamabad — while the broader Sunni population, though sympathetic to the general anti-Israel sentiment, did not mobilize in comparable numbers for Khamenei specifically. This divergence is not incidental. It reflects a sectarian geography that the demand for Pakistani military action on Iran's behalf systematically ignores.

Pakistan is roughly eighty to eighty-five percent Sunni. Its sectarian history is violent. Thousands of Shia and Sunni Pakistanis have been killed in sectarian attacks since the 1980s — attacks that were funded, in part, by both Saudi Arabia and Iran using Pakistani soil as a proxy battleground. The relationship between Pakistan's Shia minority and the Iranian state is real and deep, rooted in religious authority, clerical networks, and genuine communal solidarity. But it is not the same relationship that the Sunni majority has with Tehran. And pretending otherwise — collapsing the entire country's strategic posture into one community's religious grief — is not solidarity. It is a demand that 250 million people accept a risk that only a fraction of them would choose.

And here is the cruelest irony that no one on the streets of Gilgit or Karachi is being told: if Pakistan were to enter a military conflict with the United States over Iran, the community that would suffer most would be Pakistan's Shia. They would be the ones accused of dual loyalty. They would be the ones targeted by Sunni extremist groups who have been looking for a pretext for decades. They would be the ones whose mosques, whose imambargahs, whose processions would become targets — not of Israel, but of their own countrymen. Every sectarian massacre in Pakistan's history has followed a period of heightened sectarian tension. A war fought in the name of the Shia holy city would produce a backlash that lands not in Washington but in Parachinar, in Quetta, in D.I. Khan — the very communities that are grieving right now. The demand for war is not a demand that protects Pakistani Shia. It is a demand that exposes them.

Inside Iran itself, as documented above, Sunni Muslims are constitutionally excluded from power. Hardline Sunni groups in Pakistan have historically labeled Shia Muslims as outside the fold of Islam — and the sentiment has at times been reciprocated. These are wounds that the rhetoric of Ummah unity cannot wish away. A military alliance with Iran — a state that treats Sunni Islam as constitutionally subordinate to its Shia establishment — would inflame Pakistan's internal sectarian balance in ways that could produce more Pakistani deaths than any Israeli missile.

The people who demand that Pakistan fight for the Ummah never specify which Ummah they mean. And they never explain who, inside Pakistan, will pay the price. In practice, it would be the same people it always is: the poor, the marginalised, the minorities. The people who are already paying.

Pakistan's Foreign Policy: Cowardice or Survival?

Pakistan's official response to the Iran crisis — strong verbal condemnation of Israel, expressions of solidarity with the Iranian people, diplomatic engagement at the UN and OIC, refusal of direct military involvement, maintenance of communication channels with Washington — has been called cowardly by its critics. The charge is emotionally satisfying. It is also strategically illiterate.

Pakistan's foreign policy is not built on an absence of principle. It is built on the recognition that Pakistan is a country of 250 million people with a $410 billion economy, $135 billion in external debt, a military engaged simultaneously in counter-insurgency operations in Balochistan and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, a recently concluded shooting war with India, an open military conflict with Afghanistan, and a dependency on international financial institutions that gives Washington effective veto power over its economic survival. Any foreign policy that does not begin with these facts is not a foreign policy. It is a fantasy.

Is this everything that could have been done? Perhaps not. But name the Muslim country that did more. Saudi Arabia — the custodian of the two Holy Mosques — maintained its military partnership with the United States throughout. The UAE, Bahrain, and Kuwait host the American bases from which the strikes on Iran were launched. The Fifth Fleet that projected American power into the Persian Gulf operates from Bahraini territory with Bahraini consent. Egypt, Jordan, and Morocco issued statements of varying degrees of concern and returned to business. Turkey — a NATO member with the second-largest army in the alliance — condemned the strikes and did nothing else. Not one Muslim-majority state with the military capability to challenge the US or Israel did so. Not one.

A question worth asking, for anyone who marched on the American Consulate in Karachi: did anyone march on the Saudi embassy? On the Emirati embassy? On the Bahraini embassy? The American pilots who struck Iran took off from bases in those countries, with the permission of those governments, under bilateral defense agreements that those governments signed voluntarily. If the anger is about complicity in the attack on a Muslim country, then the anger should follow the logistics chain — and that chain runs through Riyadh and Abu Dhabi before it reaches Washington. The silence toward the Gulf states is not an oversight. It is a tell. It reveals that the anger is selective, shaped by political convenience and sectarian affiliation more than by any consistent principle of Muslim solidarity. A consistent principle would demand the same rage at every government that facilitated the strikes. It does not. It demands it only of Pakistan — the one country that refused to facilitate them.

Pakistan is being held to a standard that no other country in the Islamic world has met — including Iran itself, which offered Pakistan nothing more than mediation during the most dangerous military crisis Islamabad has faced in fifty years.

What the Arab World Actually Did — and Didn't Do

There is a pattern to crises in the Muslim world, and it is worth stating plainly. When a Muslim country is attacked, the response follows a script: emergency OIC sessions are convened, statements of "grave concern" are issued, solidarity is proclaimed, and nothing changes. The script has been performed for Palestine for seventy-five years. It was performed for Iraq. For Libya. For Syria. For Yemen. And now for Iran. The words are always identical. The action is always absent. And the country that receives the most criticism for insufficient solidarity is invariably not the one that hosts the American air base, or the one that signs normalization agreements with Israel, or the one whose sovereign wealth fund holds $900 billion in Western assets — but Pakistan.

This is not an accident. Pakistan is criticized precisely because it is the only Muslim-majority nuclear power. It is the country on which the symbolic weight of the Ummah's military self-respect has been placed, whether Islamabad wants it there or not. And the criticism serves an important function for everyone except Pakistan: it allows every other Muslim-majority state to deflect attention from its own inaction by pointing at the one country that theoretically could act but doesn't.

Pakistan's nuclear weapons were developed for one purpose: to deter an Indian first strike. They are Pakistan's existential insurance policy. They are not the Ummah's property. They are not available for strategic rental. And every time a commentator — Pakistani or otherwise — suggests that Pakistan should "use its nuclear status" to defend Iran or Palestine, they are asking Pakistan to convert its survival guarantee into a coupon for someone else's war.

The Real Duty to the Ummah

There is a duty that Pakistan owes to the Muslim world. It is not the duty that the protesters on the streets of Karachi imagine. It is harder, less dramatic, and infinitely more valuable.

Pakistan's duty to the Ummah is to survive. To remain a functioning, sovereign, nuclear-armed state with the institutional coherence to defend itself, the economic foundation to feed its people, and the diplomatic standing to advocate for Muslim causes in forums where advocacy actually matters. A Pakistan that collapses into a military confrontation with the United States does not serve the Ummah. It removes the Ummah's only nuclear deterrent from the board entirely. It transforms a country of 250 million Muslims into a failed state — another Iraq, another Libya, another cautionary tale invoked at the next OIC summit while delegates eat catered lunch.

The real threats to that survival are not external. They are the ones that this article's companion piece — "Pakistan in the Crosshairs" — documents in detail: the institutional rot, the economic capture by elites, the suppression of legitimate political opposition, the alienation of citizens from their own state. Every rupee stolen by a connected industrialist, every election rigged, every journalist imprisoned, every judge intimidated — these are not domestic inconveniences. They are strategic vulnerabilities that Pakistan's actual adversaries are already exploiting. Mossad does not need Pakistan to go to war with America. Mossad needs Pakistan to remain dysfunctional, divided, and unable to defend itself from the inside.

The people who demand that Pakistan fight for Iran are not wrong about the injustice. The strikes on Iran were brutal. The destruction of Gaza has been unconscionable. The pattern of Israeli military action — always expanding, always finding a new target, always framed as existential defense — is real and documented. But the answer to injustice is not suicide. The answer is strength. And strength, for Pakistan, means fixing the things that make it weak — not charging into a war that its economy cannot sustain, its military cannot win, and its people cannot survive.

Pakistan should not recognize Israel. It should continue to condemn Israeli aggression at every international forum. It should maintain its principled stance on Palestine. It should deepen its relationship with China and Turkey as counterweights to Western pressure. It should build — carefully, quietly, without theatrics — the kind of intelligence, economic, and diplomatic infrastructure that makes it genuinely untouchable rather than merely loud. And it should do all of this while remembering, with absolute clarity, that the country it is being asked to sacrifice itself for bombed its territory in January 2024, sided with India at the OIC, built India a port to bypass Pakistan, treated Sunni Muslims as constitutionally subordinate, and offered mediation — not solidarity — when Indian missiles were falling on Pakistani soil.

Grief is real. Anger is real. The feeling that the Muslim world is under assault is real. But feelings are not a foreign policy. And a nation of 250 million people — broke, besieged, and fighting on three borders simultaneously — cannot afford to let someone else's funeral become its own.