A senior Pakistani official says that despite the current impasse, Pakistan remains actively engaged in quiet diplomacy aimed at reducing tensions between the USand Iran, reports The Guardian

• “We are actively involved in efforts to resolve US-Iran tensions,”
• “Our offer to facilitate contacts has not changed. The understanding reached earlier remains intact, and we continue to engage both sides.”
• Pakistan's Army Chief has remained in close contact with US VP Vance and Special Envoy Witkoff as part of efforts to prevent further escalation in the region. 
• Islamabad has maintained high-level communication with Tehran, including hours-long talks between Munir and Iran’s Foreign Minister Araghchi.
• Pakistan sees itself as one of the few countries maintaining the confidence of both capitals, allowing it to quietly encourage diplomatic engagement at a time of heightened regional tensions.

Third-party mediation offers of this kind are a recurring feature of US-Iran standoffs, and historically the identity of the intermediary matters less than whether both capitals accept the channel; Pakistan here is claiming that rare position of holding the confidence of each side, a role more commonly played by Gulf or European intermediaries in past episodes. The involvement of Pakistan's military chief rather than its civilian foreign ministry is the notable structural detail, reflecting where real authority sits in Islamabad on security files and fitting a pattern in which back-channels run through defence establishments when formal diplomacy is frozen. For crude, the established sequence in these episodes is that mediation chatter trims the geopolitical risk premium embedded in prompt spreads and freight and insurance costs only once it produces something verifiable, a meeting, a framework, a named date, while statements of engagement alone have tended to fade quickly. The distinction worth drawing is between de-escalation signals that touch physical supply risk, shipping through the Strait, attacks on infrastructure, and those that merely soften rhetoric; only the former has historically sustained repricing in WTI. The tells are whether either Washington or Tehran publicly acknowledges the channel, and whether the contacts named here translate into an announced round of talks.