Since the war began on 28 February with the joint American and Israeli strikes that killed Iran’s supreme leader, Pakistan’s position has not moved an inch on paper. The Foreign Office has condemned the strikes on Iran. It has condemned Iran’s retaliatory strikes on the Gulf states. It has repeated, briefing after briefing, that there is no alternative to dialogue and that a wider war serves no one. Islamabad brokered a ceasefire in April, hosted two rounds of talks, and has kept a channel open to Tehran even as Washington’s tone hardened. On paper this looks like principled non-alignment.

Off paper, the position is getting harder to hold every week, and it is worth asking plainly what neutrality is actually buying Pakistan in return.

Start with the money. Pakistan closed the last fiscal year with a record 41.6 billion dollars in workers’ remittances, and Saudi Arabia and the UAE between them accounted for close to half of it. The labour migration behind those numbers is even more concentrated than the money suggests, since roughly seven in every ten Pakistani workers who go abroad go to Saudi Arabia alone. Analysts at Pakistan’s own Sustainable Development Policy Institute have already warned that a prolonged conflict could keep half a million prospective workers from migrating this year and force a similar number to return, with remittance losses running into billions annually. This is not a diversified exposure a diplomatic hedge can manage. It is a single corridor, and the war runs straight through the middle of it.

Then there is the geography, which does not care what Islamabad calls its policy. Pakistan shares a nine hundred kilometre border with Iran, thin on state presence in the best of times, and that border sits open while the country simultaneously fights a separate conflict along its western frontier with Afghanistan. An energy crisis linked to the wider war and domestic protests over the government’s handling of it have followed close behind. Neutrality does not insulate a country from a war on its doorstep. It only changes who Pakistan can complain to about it.

The clearest evidence that the room is closing is what Pakistan has been doing while it talks about staying above the fray. In June, its prime minister and army chief sat down with the leaders of the United States, Iran, and Qatar at a quadrilateral meeting in Switzerland, a level of direct engagement well beyond issuing statements from Islamabad. Around the same time, Pakistani officials were reportedly signing on to elements of the Gulf states’ defence arrangements while insisting, through anonymous briefings, that sending combat troops was off the table for now. Each commitment is defensible alone. Together they describe a country stacking obligations to multiple parties in a war it insists it is not part of. Every additional pact is one more call Pakistan cannot afford to ignore the next time Riyadh or Tehran makes one.

The last few days have made the point sharper still. Egypt and Oman’s foreign ministers have warned that repeated Iranian strikes on Gulf countries now pose a serious threat to regional security, not a contained one. A vessel was set ablaze off Saudi Arabia’s coast in the Red Sea after an assault this week, and the American military says its strikes are still working to degrade Iran’s capacity to hit commercial shipping. Five months in, this is not a war winding down toward the negotiated settlement Pakistan has spent its diplomatic capital pursuing. It is a war finding new fronts, and Pakistan’s mediating role, however genuinely constructive, has not stopped that from happening.

None of this means Pakistan should abandon neutrality for a side. Given the depth of its ties to both Tehran and Riyadh, and the value the region still places on Islamabad as a channel neither side has burned, there is a real case that principled non-alignment remains the only position Pakistan can actually sustain. But sustaining a position and benefiting from it are not the same thing. Pakistan’s neutrality has bought it a seat at the table in Switzerland and a hand in brokering talks that might otherwise not exist. It has not bought insulation from a war that is draining its remittance base, stretching its security forces on two fronts at once, and asking it, quietly and repeatedly, to choose sides it has so far managed to avoid choosing. The question worth asking in Islamabad is not whether neutrality is principled. It is how much longer it will still be an option.