Pakistan's army chief Asim Munir made his second trip to Tehran on Saturday 23 May, two days after cancelling the first1. The visit was described as "highly productive", with "encouraging progress" toward a final understanding. Munir had pulled out of the 21 May trip over three sticking points: the uranium stockpile, the nuclear sequencing gap, and Iranian Hormuz tolls. His return just two days later is the clearest measure of how fast Islamabad now reads the deal as moving.
Two Pakistani officials told Al Jazeera the MOU is "fairly comprehensive to terminate the war", covering a gradual Hormuz reopening, the lifting of the US blockade and the release of frozen Iranian funds2. Pakistan has functioned as the war's primary back-channel for months; it confirmed it was the active mediator last week. The cancel-then-return cycle marks a sharp acceleration: from early March, it took Islamabad six weeks to extract a single nuclear-monitoring concession.
The carrier matters as much as the message. Iran's deal architecture runs through the IRGC and the Supreme Leader's office, not the civilian Foreign Ministry, so a military principal can engage the people who actually decide. Sending the army chief rather than the foreign minister preserves the general-officer channel that has carried the war's only concrete nuclear-monitoring movement, a channel no diplomatic visit has been able to replace.
