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Cover Story

In The Belly Of The Beast

Pakistan has to look within amidst a multitude of internal pressures and the ongoing conflict between Israel and Iran

By Fathima Sheikh | April 2026


On 28 February, coordinated missile and air strikes by Israel with operational support from the United States struck military and political targets across Iran. The operation occurred while indirect negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program were still ongoing, a timing that immediately raised concerns among diplomats and analysts. Within hours of the first wave of strikes, Iranian state media confirmed that the country’s Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, had been killed in a targeted strike in Tehran along with several members of his family and senior officials.

The assassination marked the most consequential leadership decapitation in the Middle East in decades. Iran declared forty days of mourning and established an interim leadership council before the Assembly of Experts selected Khamenei’s son, Mojtaba Khamenei, as the new supreme leader of the Islamic Republic. The transition occurred in the middle of an escalating military confrontation in which Iran’s leadership has made clear that retaliation is not negotiable and that the conflict will be treated as a war of national survival rather than a diplomatic dispute.

Within this rapidly expanding strategic environment, the implications for Pakistan are unusually complex. With a population exceeding two hundred and forty million, the country occupies one of the most strategically sensitive corridors in the world– bordering Iran, Afghanistan, India, and China, while lying close to the Strait of Hormuz, through which roughly twenty percent of the world’s oil supply passes each day. At the same time, Pakistan is the only Muslim-majority state with nuclear weapons, a status that shapes its deterrence posture and embeds it in competing strategic calculations across Asia and the Middle East. This unique position amplifies Islamabad’s security dilemmas and complicates its diplomatic options at a time of intense regional tension.

Pakistan’s position in the crisis is further complicated by its relationships within the Muslim world. Islamabad maintains close relations with both Iran and Saudi Arabia, two states that have historically competed for influence in the Middle East. Pakistan shares a long border with Iran and must cooperate with Tehran on trade and border security, while Saudi Arabia is one of Pakistan’s most important economic and strategic partners. In 2025, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia formalized their security cooperation through a strategic mutual defence agreement that commits both countries to assist each other in the event of external aggression. This creates a delicate diplomatic balance. If tensions between Iran and Saudi Arabia were ever to escalate into direct confrontation, Pakistan could find itself navigating conflicting pressures between a neighboring state and a formal security partner, illustrating the complex strategic environment in which its foreign policy operates.

These realities indicate that Pakistan is not merely an observer of regional crises from afar; instead, it is situated at their convergence point. Instability in Afghanistan spills across its western frontier, and the escalation involving Iran carries immediate economic and social implications. While its defence treaty with Saudi Arabia ties Pakistan to the Gulf and the West, neighboring Iran, a strong Muslim ally, has its own history of agreements, treaties, trade, and brotherhood. Furthermore, the dispute with India over Kashmir remains unresolved between the two nuclear-armed states. Taken together, these pressures create a strategic environment in which Pakistan sits at the center of overlapping geopolitical fault lines rather than at the margins of global conflict.

Apart from the global forum, it is primarily Pakistan’s internal political landscape that has contributed to its consistent and now rapid institutional fatigue. Over the past two decades, power has largely alternated between the Pakistan Muslim League (N) and the Pakistan Peoples Party, both of which have faced repeated allegations of corruption, patronage politics, and weak governance. Critics argue that this political usurping, combined with the enduring influence of Pakistan’s establishment, has allowed structural weaknesses in the economy and governance system to deepen rather than be resolved. Quite frankly, the country is currently at the center of one of the most volatile geopolitical confrontations in the world while managing domestic divides that can easily be manipulated by any outside force because its governing bodies are compromised.


In recent years, the country’s constitutional framework, particularly its judiciary, has undergone significant revisions. The Twenty-sixth Amendment to the Constitution of Pakistan introduced a new framework for judicial appointments and created a federal constitutional court, expanding parliamentary and executive influence in a domain that historically functioned as an independent check on political authority. In most constitutional systems, the judiciary serves as the final safeguard against the concentration of power, and its legitimacy depends on clear institutional distance from political actors. When political institutions gain greater influence over judicial appointments or tenure, that separation becomes harder to preserve. In a political environment already corrupted by persistent governance illegitimacy, this change has eroded judicial independence and created new avenues through which political interests shape legal outcomes.

It is primarily Pakistan’s internal political landscape that has contributed to its consistent and now rapid institutional fatigue

Institutional fragility alone, however, does not explain Pakistan’s vulnerability. The country also sits atop several internal and regional fault lines that require careful political management. Two of the most significant lie along its western frontier: the Pashtun belt along the Afghan border and the province of Balochistan.

Pakistan’s relationship with Afghanistan has always been complex. Ethnic, tribal, and familial ties stretch across the Durand Line, particularly among Pashtun communities living on both sides of the frontier. Instability in Afghanistan rarely remains confined within Afghan territory; it inevitably spills across the border and reshapes Pakistan’s internal security environment. Those dynamics resurfaced late February 2026, when Pakistan launched a series of airstrikes in eastern Afghanistan’s Nangarhar and Paktika provinces, targeting camps and hideouts alleged to belong to the Tehrik‑e‑Taliban Pakistan (TTP). The Afghan Taliban government condemned the strikes as a violation of sovereignty, and engagements soon expanded into broader cross‑border clashes involving artillery, aircraft, and drone incidents.

Balochistan represents another sensitive pressure point. As Pakistan’s largest province by land area and one of its most resource‑rich regions, Balochistan has long experienced tensions between local political movements and the central government. Periodic insurgencies and counterinsurgency operations have created a fragile equilibrium that requires constant political attention. Analysts across Pakistan’s political spectrum acknowledge that sustained confrontation in Balochistan could produce consequences far more serious than localized unrest.

While these internal pressures unfold and Israel’s war with Iran continues to cause severe destruction within the region, Pakistan has to look within. It should not go unnoticed that a neighboring Muslim state is currently being subjected to Israeli aggression, backed by the United States, largely due to its pursuit of nuclear capability, while Pakistan, itself a Muslim nuclear power, already possesses such deterrence. In an increasingly volatile regional landscape, this contrast is instructive. It underscores how easily the interests of actors embedded within compromised institutions can be influenced or redirected, particularly in a country that may not outwardly appear to be the next target, yet, in strategic terms, may well be central to it. Pakistan does not have the luxury to sit idly and observe for long, for even silence comes at a cost.

With its fragile institutional fabric that threatens to rip at the seams, the erosion of political legitimacy, and the cultural divide that pulls its citizens towards provincial identities rather than a single national identity, Pakistan is sitting in the belly of the beast. It is not the question of whether it is next, but rather, was it Pakistan all along?

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