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Since Pakistan helped broker the April 2026 ceasefire between the United States and Iran, a harder question has come into focus: what does Pakistan actually want from the Middle East, and can it sustain a role there? In this episode of Pulse Check, Bilal Khan tests a deliberately provocative thesis — that Iran is positioning itself to become the region’s leading power, and that Pakistan can no longer treat the Middle East as a space it engages only when geography forces it to. The argument is that Islamabad may need to think of itself as a Middle Eastern power in its own right, both to balance Iran and Saudi Arabia and to ensure no single actor can set the region’s terms unilaterally.
To pressure-test that thesis, Bilal is joined by Dr. Tughral Yamin — a retired Pakistan Army Brigadier General, former associate dean at the National University of Sciences and Technology (NUST), senior research fellow at the Institute of Policy Studies (IPS), and author of six books, with a research focus on United Nations peacekeeping. Drawing on decades of service inside the Pakistani military and in Saudi Arabia, Dr. Yamin pushes back on part of the premise, arguing that Pakistan has long held a coherent Middle East policy and has been quietly leveraging it for decades.
The conversation works through Pakistan’s role as an “honest broker” in the US–Iran talks hosted in Islamabad, Iran’s reassessment of its relationship with India, the September 2025 Saudi–Pakistan mutual defence agreement, and the growing appetite for Pakistani security guarantees from Lebanon to Libya. Dr. Yamin also situates the moment in a longer history — from the Baghdad Pact and the Central Treaty Organization (CENTO) to Pakistani pilots flying combat missions in the 1973 Arab–Israeli War — to explain why, in his assessment, Iran and the Gulf states “never forget” who stood with them in a crisis.
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