Pakistan, April 9 -- A two-week ceasefire between the US and Iran, brokered through backchannel diplomacy and expected to lead to talks in Islamabad, has paused a confrontation that threatened to escalate to a full-fledged world war. In a region that has time and again learned to expect escalation as reflex, Pakistan, emerging as a key intermediary between Washington and Tehran, has been central to this development. Not by grandstanding, not by press conferences, but by no-nonsense statecraft. The ceasefire between Washington and Tehran carries many fingerprints, yet Islamabad's is the one that held the line when others seemed to have hardened positions. Call it what it is: a victory for peace.

Pakistan's role did not emerge in a vacuum....