The broker gets the headline. Whether the broker shapes the outcome is a different matter entirely.

Every few years, usually after some dramatic diplomatic moment, a version of the same argument resurfaces in Western policy circles: Pakistan, despite being economically fragile and institutionally troubled, keeps showing up at the table. India, despite being the region’s dominant economy and a democracy with global ambitions, somehow doesn’t. The implication is usually that India is doing something wrong, or that Pakistan has figured out a trick India refuses to learn. This reading is understandable. It is also, on closer inspection, considerably overstated.

What Pakistan Actually Does — and What It Costs

Let’s be clear about what Pakistan’s diplomatic record actually consists of. It has, at various points, served as a conduit between parties that could not talk to each other directly. In 1971, it facilitated the Nixon-Kissinger opening to China. Through the 1980s, it managed the American and Saudi pipeline to the Afghan mujahideen. Most recently, in early 2026, it apparently relayed a fifteen-point American peace proposal to Tehran as Washington and Iran traded strikes across the Middle East.

These are real accomplishments. The structural explanation for them is also fairly persuasive: Pakistan is nuclear-armed, so India cannot simply overwhelm it; it is perpetually broke, so it needs patrons and is therefore always in the market for a useful role to play; and it sits at a geographic crossroads that makes it hard for any outside power with regional ambitions to simply ignore. A state that needs patrons to survive is a supplicant. A state that needs patrons for everything except survival has leverage.

But this picture has a shadow side that tends to get glossed over. The same army that makes Pakistan useful as a broker also spent two decades as the Taliban’s primary patron and ran the A.Q. Khan nuclear proliferation network, which is perhaps the most consequential act of nuclear irresponsibility since the Cold War. The Saudi-Pakistani defence pact signed in September 2025 — widely celebrated as evidence of Pakistani strategic genius — places Islamabad in the position of simultaneously acting as Sunni military guarantor to Riyadh and back-channel to Tehran, while managing a domestic population that includes forty million Shia Muslims. That is not strategic elegance. That is a set of contradictions held together by willpower and ambiguity, and ambiguity eventually runs out.

As for the 2026 Iran ceasefire — the centrepiece of Pakistan’s current claim to indispensability — what has it actually produced? A communication channel, some announcements, a few deadlines that came and went, and a running commentary on Truth Social that has alternately declared peace imminent and threatened renewed bombardment, sometimes within the same week. Pakistan relayed a message. That is nothing. But it is a long way from a settlement, and attributing structural significance to a back channel whose existence owes something to a crypto deal signed in January 2026 between Pakistan’s army chief and the Trump family’s business venture requires a certain generosity of interpretation.

India’s Forgotten Record

The standard critique of Indian foreign policy — that it is all relationships and no obligations, all presence and no commitment — proceeds as though India’s diplomatic history began sometime around 2014. It didn’t.

During the Korean War, it was India’s V.K. Krishna Menon who broke the armistice deadlock that had stalled negotiations for over a year. The specific problem was prisoner-of-war repatriation — neither side could accept the other’s terms, and the talks had collapsed. India proposed voluntary repatriation overseen by a neutral commission. The formula was adopted in the 1953 Armistice, and India chaired the commission that implemented it. This is precisely the kind of creative, trust-based mediation that gets attributed exclusively to Pakistan in contemporary analysis. It happened, it worked, and it has been largely forgotten.

In Cyprus, from 1964 onward, India contributed meaningfully to the UN peacekeeping force at a moment when Greek and Turkish Cypriot violence was threatening to pull NATO members into direct confrontation. Again, not a passive gesture — load-bearing participation in a genuinely difficult situation.

In South Asia itself, India built SAARC in 1985 as a regional integration framework, and the diagnosis of its failure matters enormously. SAARC did not fail because India lost interest or refused to make commitments. It failed because Pakistan consistently used it as a platform for bilateral grievance rather than regional cooperation — most visibly when the 2016 Islamabad Summit was cancelled after Pakistan-based militants attacked an Indian Army base at Uri. When an institution you helped build gets repeatedly blocked by one of its members, the conclusion to draw is not that you should have built more institutions.

The Gulf: A Different Kind of Presence

The argument that India has no real presence in West Asia because it has no defence pacts or troops stationed in Gulf states reflects a fairly narrow idea of what presence means. Over nine million Indian nationals live and work across the Gulf. Their remittances — exceeding forty billion dollars annually — are not just an economic statistic. They represent a web of human and institutional relationships that generates its own diplomatic weight.

When conflict has broken out in Yemen, Sudan, or Lebanon, India has mounted large-scale evacuation operations for its citizens. These operations do not happen without the quiet cooperation of Gulf governments. That cooperation reflects a relationship of mutual utility — not formalised in a treaty, not legible in alliance databases, but real. India also does not need troops in Riyadh to have influence in Riyadh. It needs Saudi Arabia to care whether India is doing well. Given the depth of economic and human ties, Saudi Arabia does.

More recently, the India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor — announced at the 2023 G20 Summit in New Delhi — represents exactly the kind of connectivity architecture that is supposedly absent from Indian foreign policy. It ties Indian ports to Gulf infrastructure to European markets, and it gives multiple partners a concrete stake in Indian diplomatic stability. It is slower than a defence pact. It is also, arguably, more durable.

Strategic Autonomy and its Variables

None of this means India’s foreign policy is without genuine limitations. The doctrine of strategic autonomy — India as friend to all, obligated to none — has real costs that deserve honest acknowledgement. A state that declines binding commitments on most contested questions of international order does not accumulate allies in the deep sense — states that owe their security to Indian support and therefore have a structural interest in Indian success. Strategic autonomy, practised consistently, means India has many friends and few clients. That is a real constraint on the kind of influence that gets exercised in crisis moments.

Whether that is a correctable policy or structural reality is the more interesting question. India’s size and economic trajectory mean that many states want its friendship regardless of whether it takes sides. The United States cultivated a similar posture through much of the early twentieth century — extensive economic engagement, minimal alliance obligations — and the transition from that posture to full great-power engagement was ultimately forced by external events rather than chosen. Whether the current deterioration of the regional security environment, including the 2025 India-Pakistan conflict, might function as a similar forcing moment is perhaps the most consequential open question in South Asian foreign policy today.

What the Competition Actually Is

The framing of India versus Pakistan as competing models of diplomatic influence obscures something important: they are not competing for the same thing. Pakistan is optimised for crisis relevance — it is useful when things are going wrong, when parties cannot talk to each other, when someone needs a conduit. That is a real and valuable role. It is also, by definition, dependent on there being a crisis, on the crisis involving parties who both trust Pakistan, and on the political incentives of outside powers aligning in ways that make Islamabad useful rather than inconvenient.

India is building something slower and harder to see — economic interdependence, connectivity infrastructure, institutional presence across multilateral forums, and the accumulated credibility that comes from not being anyone’s instrument. Whether that model generates more durable influence over the next two decades than Pakistan’s brokerage model is a genuinely open question. But it is the right question to ask, and it is not answered by pointing to who was on the phone with Trump and Tehran in the same week. The broker gets the headline. Whether the broker shapes the outcome is a different matter entirely.

Disclaimer: Views expressed by writers in this section are their own and do not reflect Milli Chronicle’s point-of-view.

Seen from such a lens, Asim Munir’s use of analogies like ‘dump truck’ or the ‘railway engine’ are not harmless political theatre.

Pakistan’s leaders, both political and military, have long relied on self-serving metaphors to shape the domestic sociopolitical sphere and frame their country’s place in the broader region. Often delivered with a dramaturgical embellishment, these analogies do more than reflect insecurity or national mythmaking. They reveal a deeper strategic mindset in which Pakistan sees value in disruption, leverage through instability, and the cultivation of terrorism as a tool of statecraft.

The latest examples come from Pakistan’s powerful military establishment, which has historically dominated the country’s political and security architecture. It started with Pakistan Army Chief Asim Munir’s interaction with expatriates in Florida, United States, in August this year, wherein he deployed a comparison that captured headlines for its brazenness. “India is a shining Mercedes coming on a highway like a Ferrari,” he said. “But we are a dump truck full of gravel. If the truck hits the car, who is going to be the loser?”

On its surface, such remarks appeared to emphasize resilience: that Pakistan as a lumbering truck may not be glamorous, but it can endure any difficulty and overcome any obstacle. Yet the real significance of this ironical analogy lies elsewhere. It implies that Pakistan retains the capability as well as readiness to cause strategic disruption, even at great cost to itself, and in doing so shape regional outcomes. The metaphor glorifies collision as an equalizer. It suggests that while India surges economically and diplomatically, Pakistan’s relevance lies in its ability to destabilize.

A parallel metaphor that is being increasingly used by the country’s political and military elite describes Pakistan as a “railway engine”, that is portrays it on a slow, traditional, yet persistent mode of progress. The image is meant to frame Pakistan as foundational to South Asian stability, chugging along in contrast to India’s sleek modernization. Implicit in this imagery is the claim that the region’s momentum, direction, and safety can still be both set and derailed by Pakistan’s choices.

Such analogies may seem rhetorical to common masses and yet contain within them a longstanding doctrine of purposeful disruption that Pakistan has employed in the last several decades. It is based on its decades-old strategic worldview wherein it has consistently valorized confrontation, framing India as an existential threat, and more domestically more significant objective of positioning proxy-terrorism as a legitimate extension of state power. 

Such a propagandistic rhetoric has found currency amidst Asim Munir’s sweeping consolidation of authority through constitutional amendments to expanded control over the judiciary, nuclear command, and internal security. This narrative push is designed to reinforce his martial narrative that Pakistan may be economically battered, politically unstable, and diplomatically isolated, but it remains capable of inflicting damage that forces global attention.

As such, while Pakistan’s establishment may dress its messaging in fresh metaphors, the underlying doctrine has barely evolved. Since the 26/11 attacks by ISI supported Lashkar-e-Toiba terrorists in Mumbai, there has been little substantive reckoning within Pakistan about the use of terrorist groups as strategic assets. If anything, the rhetoric of state officials in the years since reveals continuity, not change.

It should be noted that there has been consensus within Pakistani establishment, as exposed by the statements from senior retired generals, political leaders, and religious ideologues, who often reiterate that proxy terrorism can be a “force multiplier” against India. Such an argument has been repeatedly framed as asymmetric necessity given that since Pakistan cannot match New Delhi conventionally, so it must leverage “non-state actors” to disrupt India’s rise even as its own economy falters. It explains why and how terrorist groups like LeT and Jaish-e-Mohammed have been normalized within the socio-political discourse of the country by portraying terrorists as instruments of pressure than what they are: terrorists.

This mindset is reflected not only in Pakistan’s reluctance to prosecute figures like Hafiz Saeed or Masood Azhar, but also in its sustained tolerance of groups that openly espouse cross-border terrorism sold as so-called jihad. And the danger of such rhetoric is not abstract as it has recurrently translated into violence that has spilled far beyond India’s borders. Be it 26/11 attacks of 2008 in India or the 9/11 attacks in the United States in 2001, these showcased how such a mentality that the Pakistani establishment patronises can have devastating human costs.

Just as the 9/11 attacks targeted symbols of American openness and global leadership which the world forever, 26/11 targeted India’s cosmopolitan identity to sow internal discord and disrupt its global economic rise. Therefore, should Pakistan’s leadership continue to present disruption as strategic leverage, as they are doing currently, the risk of mass-casualty attacks would remain unacceptably high.

Seen from such a lens, Asim Munir’s use of analogies like ‘dump truck’ or the ‘railway engine’ are not harmless political theatre. It is a reflection of a national mindset of a country of mismanaged economy, which is unable to compete with rising India in any domain, sees strategic relevance in the threat of sabotage. It is a worldview that sees regional equilibrium not in growth or cooperation but in managed instability maintained through terrorist proxies. And that worldview does not confine risk to South Asia, which is why Pakistan’s analogies matter. 

In such a scenario, while India cannot afford any complacency, it makes it implicit on the international community to acknowledge that South Asian terrorism, especially when linked to state sponsorship like Pakistan’s role, poses a threat transcending national borders.

Nevertheless, two lessons stand out. Firstly, there needs to be greater transnational intelligence synergy at the international level. For instance, given that countries like India, the United States, the EU, Israel, Southeast Asian partners, and Gulf states, have a shared interest in tackling terrorism, they would need to bolster real-time intelligence exchange, establish joint tracking of financing networks, and coordinated monitoring of extremist propaganda.

Secondly, diplomatic isolation of terror-sponsoring frameworks is no longer optional. The world must explicitly differentiate between Pakistan as a nation and Pakistan’s security apparatus as a destabilizing actor and shape policy accordingly. This is because civilian government is a façade in that country as it is overwhelmingly dominated by the military establishment. 

Therefore, the “dump truck” and “railway engine” analogies may have been meant to project endurance, but they expose a darker truth of Pakistan’s military leadership’s outdated belief that regional power can be exercised through disruption and not development. Unless such a mindset is confronted at political, diplomatic, and strategic levels, the international community should rest assured that its risks will not be borne by India alone. 

Disclaimer: Views expressed by writers in this section are their own and do not reflect Milli Chronicle’s point-of-view.