In 2019, Lindsey Graham Sounded Like Washington’s Best Salesman for Pakistan
This is the part many younger Pakistanis will not remember.
In July 2019, after participating in the meeting between Donald Trump and then-prime minister Imran Khan, Graham issued a statement through his own Senate office. He said: “It is now time for the United States to have a strategic relationship with Pakistan.” He promoted a free trade agreement linked to security performance and praised changes he said he had observed in Pakistan’s military approach along the Afghan border.
Read that again.
A strategic relationship.
Trade.
Regional stability.
Recognition of Pakistan’s military actions.
Pakistan’s “complete buy-in” as essential to the Afghanistan settlement.
Then look at the timing. Graham’s statement came on July 22, 2019. Pakistan’s civil-award announcement came weeks later, on August 14.
By January 2020, Pakistan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs was still officially appreciating Graham’s support for strengthening the Pakistan-US strategic partnership. The ministry recorded his support for greater bilateral trade, agricultural cooperation and movement towards a free trade agreement, while Graham praised Pakistan’s role in the Afghan political reconciliation process.
From Islamabad’s perspective at the time, the calculation is not difficult to reconstruct. Pakistan had endured years of American accusations over Afghanistan, Trump had previously attacked Pakistan publicly, and the country desperately needed influential voices inside Washington willing to argue that engagement with Islamabad was strategically necessary.
Graham was useful.
So Pakistan honoured him.
That is precisely the problem.
What Nobody Is Telling Pakistan: We Keep Confusing Usefulness With Friendship
Foreign policy has no permanent friends. Pakistanis repeat this sentence endlessly and then our state behaves as though every foreign politician who says three pleasant things about Islamabad deserves to be emotionally adopted.
Lindsey Graham was not necessarily lying in 2019 when he advocated a stronger relationship with Pakistan. The more uncomfortable explanation is that Pakistan genuinely aligned with an American strategic requirement at that particular moment.
Washington wanted a way out of Afghanistan.
Pakistan mattered.
Imran Khan mattered.
Pakistan’s military establishment mattered.
The Taliban channel mattered.
Therefore, Lindsey Graham spoke of strategic partnership, trade incentives and mutual economic benefit.
This transactional geometry is exactly why my earlier analysis, Donald Trump: The New World Order and the Muslim World, argued that Pakistan must read international diplomacy through power and leverage rather than the emotional vocabulary sold in press conferences. Pakistan is celebrated when Pakistan is necessary; Pakistan is lectured when Pakistan is independently useful to somebody Washington dislikes.
The lesson was sitting in front of us.
We simply awarded it a medal.
Then Came Gaza, Iran and Graham’s Unapologetic Israel Alignment
Lindsey Graham’s political identity cannot honestly be separated from his extraordinary support for Israel’s military posture.
In November 2023, when asked whether there was a level of civilian deaths in Gaza that would cause him to question Israel’s approach, Graham said there was “no limit” in the context of the objective of destroying Hamas, although he also said Israel should try to limit civilian casualties.
In May 2024, he invoked the American atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki while arguing that Israel should be given the weapons it required to end its war. Graham later rejected the interpretation that he had literally called for a nuclear attack on Gaza, but his argument remained rooted in the idea that an existential war could justify overwhelming force.
This was not some anonymous internet radical writing beneath a flag emoji.
This was a senior American senator with decades of congressional influence.
By the time of his death, even mainstream obituary coverage described Graham as a staunch supporter of Israel and an advocate of an aggressive American foreign-policy posture, particularly on Iran.
So when Graham eventually turned his suspicion towards Pakistan during the 2026 Iran crisis, Pakistanis should have understood the ideological collision immediately.
Pakistan was attempting to function as a diplomatic bridge.
Graham was looking at the region through a different security architecture.
Those two positions were eventually going to collide.
