From missiles to ceasefire: how India and Pakistan pulled back from the brink

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Indian surface-to-air missiles were already soaring towards Pakistan’s most significant military bases when the first call came from the US.

It was 4am in Islamabad and Marco Rubio, the US secretary of state and recently appointed US national security adviser, was on the line to the man everyone knew was calling the shots in Pakistan: army chief Gen Asim Munir.

It was the beginning of eight hours of negotiations, mediated by the US, that finally secured a fragile ceasefire between India and Pakistan at midday on Saturday, according to two Pakistan security and intelligence officials who spoke to the Guardian. The agreement was first publicly announced by Donald Trump on his Truth Social platform, although Pakistan said the US president never personally made any calls to their side during the negotiations.

When India first launched missiles at Pakistan early on Wednesday, as retribution for a militant attack in Indian-administered Kashmir in April that killed 26 people, the US showed little interest in getting involved.

The US had already said India had “the right to defend itself” after the Kashmir attack, and India framed its strikes on Pakistan as solely hitting “terrorist camps” that threatened its national security, rather than any civilian or military targets.

Asked in the Oval office that day about the escalating tensions between India and Pakistan, Trump said dismissively: “They’ve been fighting for a long time. I just hope it ends very quickly.”

Speaking on Thursday, his vice-president, JD Vance, said simply it was “none of our business”.

But by late Friday night, as both sides escalated the conflict, it was made clear to the Trump administration that leaving the two nuclear armed countries to their own devices posed a danger not just to the region but to the world – and that the only third party mediator acceptable to both sides was the US, as it has historically been over decades. In particular, the US began to fear the escalation towards a nuclear threat was becoming a very real possibility.