Islamabad is a city on hold, gripped by the limelight of its own success, host to something potentially historic — but it remains unclear how distant that may be.
Five-star hotels in the Pakistani capital have been empty, awaiting diplomatic delegations for a next round of negotiations this week between Iran and the US. Bougie restaurants shuttered their kitchens, their usual well-heeled clientele unable to make it past army and police check posts strategically sprinkled at almost every major city intersection.
Then on Tuesday, US President Donald Trump said he would extend a ceasefire with Iran until it submits a proposal to end the conflict permanently – raising the possibility of an even longer wait.
All too often, Islamabad has hit headlines for all the wrong reasons. It was the target of a militant Islamist suicide bombing as recently February, with more than 60 people killed in an attack on a mosque.
Officials here saw the planned talks as an opportunity to perhaps reframe the country’s international image away from its tarnished legacy as a onetime sanctuary for the Taliban who attacked US troops in Afghanistan, and where the arch terrorist Osama Bin Laden hid for years.
A way out of that international wilderness still beckons — if Pakistan can broker peace between the US and Iran . That’s the hope at least.
Police manning the city’s road closures seem relaxed, lounging on their stationary motor bikes and only aroused — as this reporter witnessed — when a senior officer drove by telling them to chase a boy from under a nearby sapling where he’d fallen asleep.
The only people minded to attack the police and the army who loiter machine guns in hand are the Islamists waging an insurgency along the border with Afghanistan — though they likely can’t even get into the city because of rings of road closures radiating out from the talks venue for tens of miles.
Whole hunks of Islamabad’s sprawling road grid are eerily silent. Dogs slink across six lane highways and the odd weary worker trudges through becalmed boulevards, which on any other day would have been dicy with certain injury amid the high speed traffic.
Government workers have been told to work from home. Schools are closed, markets empty, the produce stuck outside the city. Off limits are the walking trails in the beautiful forested Margala hills, the tiny fingers of mighty Himalayan mountains that feel their way in to this majestic city.
Marooned at the heart of all the circles and check posts of security are government offices, ministries and most importantly the planned venue for US-Iran talks, a prestige hotel surrounded by its resplendent gardens.
If the talks do eventually take place here and history is made, it will immortalize Islamabad’s place in the pantheon of humble and noble sites that have hosted great leaders come to mend differences and save their peoples from bloodshed.
The Dayton Peace Accords spring to mind, named for the city that hosted talks ending the three years of bloodletting and civil war in Bosnia in the early 1990. I witnessed that war first hand, saw the peace, and knew the lives it saved.
Not all peace talks work out. In Minsk in 2014, I witnessed the hasty and imperfect peace deal foisted on the Ukrainians by Russia and the international community following Moscow’s first Ukraine invasion. It didn’t hold because it wasn’t balanced.
For several years, I covered Iran-US nuclear deal talks during the Obama administration. Switzerland was favored venue, and the stakes weren’t so high back then; the two countries weren’t at war and the global economy didn’t hang on control of the Strait of Hormuz .
The scale and ambition of those talks were smaller, as were the venues, with lockdowns limited to a few streets.
In 2015, the talks finally reached Vienna, home to the International Atomic Energy Agency, a logical last step for the complex and the hard fought 2015 JCPOA nuclear deal.
Today, ambitions are bigger for the talks; the US hopes not just to curb nuclear development but to limit Iran’s links to its terrorist proxies, curb its lethal and growing arsenal of long range ballistic missiles, and open the Strait of Hormuz.
Were a European city hosting talks of this complexity and magnitude, it is hard to imagine the public quietly enduring what Islamabad’s residents have experienced.
But if the US and Iran manage to revive peace talks, then Islamabad, its patient citizens, and its tireless diplomats might get their chance not just to heave the country towards a positive place in the world, but to immortalize their capital as a place of hope for others.
