Guterres lands in Islamabad and credits Pakistan with the US-Iran talks

António Guterres landed in Islamabad in the early hours of Tuesday and, standing beside Deputy Prime Minister Ishaq Dar, credited Pakistan with opening the channel that produced the Islamabad memorandum between the United States and Iran. His official visit runs from 6 to 8 October, at Dar's invitation. Acting foreign secretary Nabeel Munir received him at the airport.

At the press conference Guterres said Pakistan's engagement on peace and security was "front and centre". He said he saluted the leadership for helping create the conditions for dialogue and for mediating the conflict. "Your efforts helped deliver the Islamabad memorandum of understanding, the subsequent ceasefire and the framework for future negotiations," he said. "Every Pakistani should be proud of that pivotal role."

He then addressed the parties from the Pakistani capital. "End the conflict, return to diplomacy and restore navigational rights in accordance with international law." The line matters because the war with Iran has already moved shipping, air routes and insurance premia across the Gulf. A call to restore navigational rights is a call about the Strait of Hormuz and the adjacent sea lanes, not a general appeal for calm.

Dar used the same meeting to put Pakistan's own file on the table. The foreign office said the two men discussed Palestine, Jammu and Kashmir, Afghanistan, counter-terrorism and the future of multilateral institutions. Dar restated the demand for a settlement of Kashmir in line with Security Council resolutions and briefed Guterres on the Indus Waters Treaty. He also walked the secretary-general through Islamabad's facilitation of the US-Iran talks.

The programme for the rest of the visit is institutional rather than ceremonial. Guterres is due to meet President Asif Ali Zardari, Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif and Field Marshal Asim Munir, who holds both the army chief's post and the new title of chief of defence forces. He will visit the headquarters of the UN Military Observer Group in India and Pakistan, the observer mission that has sat on the ceasefire line since 1949, and take a briefing at the National Disaster Management Authority.

That mix is deliberate. UNMOGIP is one of the oldest UN field presences and a reminder that Kashmir remains on the organisation's books even when the great powers treat it as a bilateral quarrel. The disaster-authority briefing lets Islamabad show flood early-warning work after successive monsoon disasters. The foreign office said the visit would highlight Pakistan's support for multilateralism with the UN at its centre.

Guterres also tied the wider region to Palestine. "There will never be peace in the region until the right of self-determination of the Palestinian people is recognised, as Pakistan has long championed," he said. The sentence sits next to a separate call he made this week for a permanent ceasefire in Gaza, ahead of the third anniversary of the 7 October 2023 attacks. The Islamabad stop folds that file into a trip whose centre of gravity is the US-Iran war.

The calendar on his own job is short. His second five-year term ends on 31 December 2026. This is not his first trip to Pakistan. He came in February 2020, about three years after the General Assembly elected him in 2016. A secretary-general in the last quarter of a ten-year run has little leverage over a war the United States is fighting, and he used the visit to record a mediation that already happened rather than to announce a new plan.

The practical test is whether the Islamabad memorandum still holds. Guterres described three products of the talks: the memorandum, a subsequent ceasefire, and a framework for future negotiations. He did not say the ceasefire is intact. He asked the parties to end the conflict and to put navigational rights back under international law. Shipping and airline notices around the Gulf this week have treated Saudi and Yemeni airspace as a live theatre, with the Houthis exempting only the airspace over Mecca and Medina.

For Islamabad the visit is also a status claim. Pakistan is not a party to the US-Iran fighting, yet Dar can point to a memorandum signed in his capital and a UN secretary-general repeating that fact on Pakistani soil. The same week, Pakistan, Turkey and Saudi Arabia switched on the deployment clause of their August Mecca pact after Houthi strikes on the kingdom. Guterres did not address that pact at the press conference. The two tracks now sit side by side: a mediation file with Washington and Tehran, and a collective-defence file with Riyadh and Ankara.

What he left open is the content of the framework. He did not read out remaining disputes, a date for the next round, or a guarantor for the navigational-rights demand. The meetings with Sharif and Munir will show whether Islamabad wants the UN attached to the next round or prefers to keep the channel bilateral. His term ends in 86 days.