The Iranian delegation that arrived in Islamabad on the night of April 10 came aboard a Pakistani Air Force plane that switched off its transponder over Pakistani airspace. The aircraft disappeared from tracking systems and reappeared on the ground at Nur Khan airbase. Its passengers, Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi and parliamentary speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, moved swiftly and without announcement into a secured convoy heading for the Serena Hotel, where 10,000 deployed security personnel had sealed every approach road since dawn. The lockdown had been in place for twenty-four hours. Islamabad’s streets, usually loud with the ordinary friction of traffic and commerce, were quiet in the way cities become quiet when governments are conducting business they cannot name publicly.
Iran’s chief negotiators flew into peace talks inside a plane that could not be seen, in a city that had been prepared for them without their choosing, to negotiate conditions they had rejected three times in the preceding twelve days. That sequence does not describe a sovereign state exercising its options at the diplomatic table. It describes a state that has been told where to show up and is showing up.
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