Tampa is a town of hot sun and cold beer — the ideal retirement spot, in other words, for a broad-shouldered US general. Yet if Michael Kurilla was all smiles as he bid farewell to military life, at a ceremony in the Florida city on Sunday, he was shadowed by a rather unusual guest. For amid the stars and stripes and smiles stood another senior officer, not American at all but the de facto leader of an Islamic government half the world away.
Offering Kurilla a friendly handshake — and Dan Caine, America’s top military officer, an invite to his Pakistani homeland — Field Marshal Asim Munir is clearly at home in the Land of the Free. In June, for instance, he enjoyed a two-hour private lunch with Donald Trump, while Islamabad has also nominated the President for the Nobel Peace Prize, describing him as a “genuine peacemaker” who’d soon bring peace to Iran and Gaza alike. Never mind that Tehran is bloodied and Rafah a wasteland: such shameless toadying has long been central to Pakistani foreign policy.
After all, there have to be some advantages to sharing your four land borders with the continent’s great powers of India and China, alongside the pariah states of Iran and Afghanistan. And if our new geopolitical era is to be defined by multilateral deal-making, atomic brinkmanship and vaulting duplicity, Pakistan would appear to be extraordinarily well positioned. There is, perhaps, no nation on Earth better at playing one set of interests off against another — especially when it’s the only Muslim nuclear power, and enjoys a robust tradition of self-interested military leaders keen to consolidate their own power.
Munir has so far proved himself adept at negotiating these difficult waters. When he’s not glad-handing in America, he basks in the afterglow of what is seen (in Pakistan at least) as a “triumph” over India, after the two countries seemed poised to enter full-scale conflict over the disputed territory of Kashmir earlier this year. Not one to waste an opportunity, Munir had initially used the 12-day war between Iran and Israel to consolidate Pakistan’s growing influence in the region and present itself as a useful and, if needs be, servile partner to the US.
Certainly, Munir himself is keen to oblige. During his lunch at the White House, he presented himself as a trusted source of information on Iran, discussing rare-earth minerals and bitcoin mining contracts — and apparently receiving a MAGA hat for his troubles. Pakistanis know Iran “better than most,” Trump told reporters following the meeting.
Pakistani officials were also in Washington in July, dangling lucrative mining contracts in front of American firms; promising to buy American cotton and soy; and vowing to devote 2000MW of electricity (a coal-fired power station’s worth) to bitcoin mining, the latter a flattering imitation of the Trump family’s own grand crypto scheme. Islamabad has also co-signed a “letter of intent” with Trump’s pet syndicate, World Liberty Financial, vowing to cooperate on blockchain and stablecoin adoption.
The general idea is clearly to discourage US tariffs — not least given Pakistani factories produce many of the cheap consumables so beloved of American voters. And, it must be said, Islamabad has lately managed to get its tariff down to 19%: not ideal, but better than the 29% previously threatened. Either way, Pakistan knows better than most how to be a client state. If all this results in American investment, Munir will congratulate himself on having played a storming innings on a tough wicket.
Promoted to Field Marshal in May following the “triumph” over India, Munir has managed to promote himself from the depths of unpopularity to become his country’s ruler in all but name. As his frequent transatlantic trips imply, even the White House has played along: he’s now the go-to interlocutor in Washington, with Pakistan’s hapless civilian politicians left twiddling their thumbs.
All this is part of a broader strategic plan. For if rekindling animosity against India, helped Munir consolidate his power, the Trump-led ceasefire — Modi’s government vehemently denies the idea of US intervention — has further established Pakistan’s aspirations of parity with India. That there would be the need for global mediation contradicts Indian assertions that they are the subcontinent’s hegemon, and it undermines New Delhi’s insistence that all issues with Pakistan, including Kashmir, can only be discussed bilaterally.
In many ways, this year’s India-Pakistan crisis foreshadowed the Israel-Iran conflict. In both Kashmir and Palestine, there are Muslim populations under the occupation of non-Muslim militaries. In both Kashmir and Palestine, jihadi proxies of Pakistan and Iran have sought to liberate these Muslim populations with attacks on civilians. In turn, India and Israel have both targeted military infrastructure in Pakistan and Iran that they deem to be existential threats.
And while Israel’s war specifically targeted Iran’s nuclear enrichment sites, prompting America’s involvement, it was similarly Pakistan’s possession of a nuclear arsenal that fast-tracked the American-negotiated ceasefire. To reiterate: Pakistan is the sole Muslim country with a nuclear arsenal — something its leaders have described explicitly as an “Islamic bomb”. For the past two months, Trump hasn’t failed to miss an opportunity to remind the world that he was the man who “stopped nuclear war”.
Whether or not going nuclear was even remotely considered by Munir, the mere suggestion of escalation not only won Pakistan the ceasefire — but also focused American minds on Pakistan at a moment when it had progressively fallen under Chinese influence.
China has invested heavily in Pakistani infrastructure in the past decades via its Belt and Road initiative, creating the $62 billion China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, which gives Beijing vital access to Pakistani ports. However, it has done so in the face of increased resentment and symbolic attacks on Chinese targets, including a 2018 attack on its consulate in Karachi. China, for its part, has responded by micromanaging Pakistan, transforming the country into a de facto colony.
Still, it was ironically Pakistan’s successful use of Chinese military equipment, shooting down two Indian fighter planes, that prompted the US return to the aid of Islamabad; in recent years, America has counted on Indian military strength as a counterbalance to China. This is precisely the sort of complicated balance of power that Pakistan is now poised to exploit, by playing American and Chinese interests off against one another to get the best deals out of the two competing world powers.
No less important to the US is the influence that Pakistan wields to its north. Pakistan is now a key part of the Saudi Arabia-led military coalition of Sunni states, orchestrated by Riyadh, whose aim is to counter the influence of Iran and its Shia allies in the region. Indeed, Pakistan has allowed Salafi jihadi proxies funded by Saudi Arabia to flourish in the region for decades.
“No less important to the US is the influence that Pakistan wields to its north.”
This is why, as Israel and Iran clashed, Pakistan joined a host of Muslim countries in condemning the Jewish state, even as it prepared for the downfall of the Shia one. Pakistan was careful to distance itself from Tehran’s wishful claim that Pakistan would lend it military support against Israel — and went so far as to close the border with Iran to prove the point.
Field Marshal Munir will now be bracing for the call of duty. Should the collapse of the Islamist regime in Tehran throw the country into chaos, or should the existing regime fail to follow through with the updated nuclear agreement, it seems likely that the eager Pakistan army would be called into service at the behest of the Americans. The US won’t want the Islamist in Tehran to obtain a nuclear bomb with the connivance of the Islamist regime in Islamabad that already has one.
If there are contradictions inherent in all of this, Pakistan has form. After all, Islamabad famously took money from America to fight the Taliban in Afghanistan, only to allow jihadist groups to run amok with its notorious “Good Taliban, Bad Taliban” strategy. This backfired, though, when the Afghan Taliban — the good one, as opposed to the bad one — was close to establishing official ties with Iran in the lead-up to the recent clashes. The Taliban regime in Kabul will now look to increase its own push for Trump’s recognition, offering to serve American interests in Iran. That, it goes without saying, would be a nightmare scenario for the Pakistani army.
Small wonder, then, that Pakistan is now attempting to position itself as a vital US partner in the region: a haven for crypto speculation, a mine of rare earth minerals, whatever the environmental or the human cost. But the West should be careful. For this is also a state that has harboured jihadis who launched attacks on American soil, has all but given up on democracy — and, a little over two months ago, brought the world to the brink of nuclear war. Even so, Pakistan’s attempts at flattery are working. If Trump does indeed win the Nobel Peace Prize, it would represent a significant victory for Pakistan, and a global recognition of the country’s triumph over India. It would also be the supreme vindication of Asim Munir’s playbook: why make peace when you can make deals?
