Pakistan’s Mediation Crisis: Why the Real Power in Tehran Refuses to Come to the Table

From the start of Pakistan’s efforts to mediate between Iran and the United States, we posited that Islamabad and Rawalpindi would face a major challenge – i.e., getting the new heads of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) to the negotiating table.

With the previous leadership eliminated in the US-Israeli strikes, the authority to manage the IRGC operationally fell to a cadre of regional commanders. While they implemented a preexisting retaliation strategy – i.e., by disaggregating the authority to plan and execute strikes, hence the ‘Mosaic Defence’ doctrine – that devolution also vested them with the power to direct Iran’s future.

In effect, the actual power to decide Iran’s trajectory swung into the hands of IRGC leaders who, as one can now see from the weeks of fighting that occurred since, are not willing to implement any one-sided US-led plan on Iran, especially one that targets regime change – read: eliminating the IRGC’s grip on Iran’s economic and political levers. Moreover, these younger leaders saw what happened to their pragmatic predecessors who negotiated with the US (i.e., attacks during negotiations and, ultimately, elimination).

Thus, for talks – and by consequence, Pakistani-led mediation – to substantively matter, these new IRGC heads would need to be at the table.

Pakistan’s Chief of Defence Forces (CDF), General Asim Munir, was able to bring the remnants of the old IRGC to the table – e.g., the Speaker of the Iranian Parliament, Mohammad-Bagher Ghalibaf, and Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi – but he could not deliver on the people who matter most: the people the world has yet to know. Despite visiting Iran in his uniform – to signal his position as a respected military head – General Asim Munir was still unable to bring these new IRGC heads to the fore.

The Structural Shift in the IRGC’s Command Hierarchy

This author indicated that bringing the new IRGC leadership would be the main challenge. In a Quwa Plus article dated 9 April, this author stated:

What followed was a structural shift in the IRGC’s command hierarchy. Ahmad Vahidi – an old-guard figure from the Corps’ founding era – was appointed as the new IRGC commander-in-chief. However, beneath Vahidi, a new generation of second-tier operational commanders has filled the positions vacated by the generals killed in the strikes. These are officers who, according to US intelligence assessments, earned their experience not in the Iran-Iraq War but in the campaigns in Syria and Iraq – and who are described as more hardline and less constrained than their predecessors. Much of the signalling from Tehran about an openness to talks and de-escalation came via more traditional regime figures, such as the Parliamentary Speaker and the Foreign Minister. The new IRGC operational tier, by contrast, did not share this disposition.

That same analysis continued:

The US, in turn, leaned on Pakistan to establish a channel with both the remaining Iranian regime heads and the new IRGC leadership. This task, however, presented significant challenges. The new IRGC operational commanders were not – and may still not be – convinced of America’s seriousness in negotiating, suspecting that Washington may use a truce to manoeuvre rather than to settle. Moreover, these officers did not have the same deference to Pakistan or to Gulf intermediaries such as Oman and Qatar as their predecessors – many of the older IRGC leaders who had cultivated and worked through such networks were killed in the US-Israeli strikes.

In that earlier analysis, we credited Gen. Munir for managing to align these younger IRGC heads – whether directly or indirectly – with their older predecessors to a ceasefire.

This likely conferred on Gen. Munir significant credibility with the US, as he demonstrated some measure of influence over the IRGC, at least enough to get the younger heads to align with their older counterparts – Ghalibaf and Araghchi – on a cessation of hostilities.

The Islamabad Talks/Process is Futile

However, Gen. Munir evidently could not go much further, as the younger IRGC leaders did not show up at the Islamabad Talks.

Instead, the older figures – Ghalibaf and Araghchi – represented Iran in those talks, but it appears that the US did not take them seriously.

These older figures no longer represent the younger voices shaping Iran’s security policy today. Yes, the public framing of the Islamabad Talks was that a deal was being reached, but Iran did not concede on Washington’s nuclear terms.

However, one should ask: Is either Ghalibaf or Araghchi in a position to make major decisions on that front today? Whether it was the absence of the new IRGC heads at the table or their unwillingness to budge on the nuclear issue, the issue at hand is the same: the US was not able to get the younger IRGC leadership to align with its direction.

In a recent post on Truth Social, President Donald Trump indicated that the real blocker is the apparent fragmentation in Iran’s leadership. However, the more accurate reading, as per the Quwa perspective, is that the US has yet to speak with the right Iranian leaders.

The fragmentation is a real issue, but it is less about institutional disarray and more about a generational shift in who holds operational power within the IRGC. CNN’s analysis noted that the real powers behind Iran’s negotiating posture are “in the shadows and silent” – and unlike Trump, they are not broadcasting their thinking. That framing aligns with our assessment: the people who matter are not speaking, and the people who are speaking do not matter – at least not in the way that the US needs them to.

Thus, General Asim Munir and Prime Minister Shahbaz Sharif may be entering more precarious waters with the White House in the coming days and weeks. They need the younger IRGC heads to show up to the table, but at this time, these heads are not interested.

Ultimately, Pakistan is being reduced to shuttling messages between the White House and the IRGC, with the agency to affect matters out of its hands.

Pakistan Must Pivot Quickly

Thus, Pakistan must rebalance its priorities by focusing on the enduring security of its Gulf partners, most notably Saudi Arabia.

Ultimately, it is up to Iran and the US to work for peace, but as it stands now and into the foreseeable future, the surrounding region, if not the world, will be mired in perpetual ambiguity and risk.

Be it the Strategic Mutual Defence Agreement (SMDA) with Riyadh, the historical ties with the Gulf capitals, or the fact that – irrespective of the conflict – Pakistan will must work with the Gulf in perpetuity, it is imperative that Pakistan show that it is now prioritizing the Gulf’s security.

Now, this shift may invite criticism, with a common refrain or sentiment being that Pakistan ought to prioritize its own security ahead of the Gulf. However, by taking on the burden of securing the Gulf at a time when security is, arguably, the most vital need of the hour, Pakistan will be in a position to set a high premium.

This is now the moment where, for example, Pakistan can integrate its economic security with defence policy, e.g., require subsidized oil and gas, cash to balance its fiscal books, foreign investment and markets for hard-currency gains, greater access to the Gulf’s labour market, and so on. In other words, Pakistan’s leaders must tie the Gulf’s security with that of Pakistan’s security vis-a-vis India, and on multiple layers, be it economic or in direct military comparability.

Indeed, a more aggressive approach would be to try integrating Pakistan into the Gulf’s energy supplies to India (e.g., requiring crude to route through refineries in Pakistan before transiting to India). This could give Islamabad/Rawalpindi actual leverage when trying to secure Pakistan’s water interests, for example.

In other words, Pakistan ought to establish terms that secure its own national interests before supporting the needs of the Gulf. The Gulf capitals at this time now all accept that security is a vital issue, one worth spending into. Pakistan, however, should learn to not underask for the value it provides. Thus, the right starting point for Islamabad/Rawalpindi would be to assert that there will be no real security for the Gulf until Pakistan is secure from India, and, in turn, work upon that as the reference point for all policy moving forward.

In any case, it falls on Pakistan’s leadership and intelligentsia to start reframing the current crisis as a new normal, i.e., a reality where the Gulf must pivot back to native regional security partners, with Pakistan being the top one. However, for this idea to land, Pakistan’s top leadership must not let the mediation effort take priority (or at least seem to take priority) over the current security fallout.

Finally, returning to Iran and the US.

In this author’s assessment, while the younger IRGC heads are not interested in speaking with Trump or his administration, they likely still have deference to the wider US political leadership. It is possible that Iran’s emergent leaders believe their focus should be on influencing US public opinion and, potentially, a future administration to adopt a more amenable approach to them.

If so, then Pakistan’s mediating role may face a structural ceiling – the IRGC’s emergent tier appears to be looking past this moment in US politics altogether, and no amount of Pakistani shuttle diplomacy can change the intentions driving their decisions. Instead, Pakistan’s focus must shift to architecting a position for itself in the Middle East, one that defines Pakistan as a trusted security leader of the states that want stability, not an exit-enabler for two evidently belligerent and destabilizing powers. In fact, returning to the original point, there is now reason to believe that Tehran is becoming skeptical of Pakistan’s role in the matter, thus a risk that would cut Pakistan out of properly inserting self in the region’s security fabric on one end, and jeopardizing what it has gained on the mediation front on the other.