ISLAMABAD — Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif moved on Tuesday to convert Pakistan’s unexpected diplomatic windfall from the Islamabad ceasefire framework into tangible economic concessions, announcing a fresh approach to the International Monetary Fund for relief on a $7 billion program and unveiling preliminary terms for a trade-corridor agreement with Saudi Arabia and Iraq that his government described as the first commercial dividend of its mediation role.

Speaking at a brisk midday press appearance in the prime minister’s official residence, Sharif said his finance minister, Muhammad Aurangzeb, would travel to Washington next week to seek a revised structural-adjustment timetable and the release of a $1.1 billion tranche held up since February. He also confirmed that Foreign Minister Ishaq Dar had concluded a memorandum of understanding with his Saudi and Iraqi counterparts on a Gwadar-to-Basra logistics arrangement that, Pakistani officials said, would carry reconstruction freight under preferential customs and insurance terms.

“The world has seen what Pakistan is capable of when it acts as a bridge,” Sharif told reporters. “Our economy will now be judged by whether it can be the bridge it has shown itself to be diplomatically.”

The push reflects a calculated effort by Sharif’s PML-N-led coalition to translate intangible prestige into hard currency before the political afterglow of the April 12 ceasefire dissipates. Pakistani officials had quietly begun preparing the diplomatic-to-economic pivot in the final hours of the Islamabad talks, two government advisers said, briefing Western embassies that the mediator’s bill should not be paid in compliments alone.

The IMF, which had stiffened its posture toward Pakistan in February over slippage on revenue targets and stalled privatization of two state-owned enterprises, has signaled a more conciliatory tone since the ceasefire. Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva called Sharif on April 15, the day the truce took effect, to congratulate the Pakistani government and, according to a readout released by the prime minister’s office, “to discuss the constructive role Pakistan continues to play in regional stability.” Pakistani officials interpreted the call as an opening; one senior aide to the finance minister said the next staff-level engagement would test “whether the rhetoric translates into a board document.”

Hina Rabbani Khar, a former foreign minister now advising the prime minister’s office on the corridor file, said the Gulf reconstruction track represented a once-in-a-generation alignment of regional interest with Pakistani capacity. “We have ports, we have a logistics workforce, we have legacy ties across the Gulf and a labor relationship with Iraq that survived the worst of the 2000s,” she said. “If Pakistan does not capture a meaningful share of the reconstruction freight, that will be a domestic political failure, not a diplomatic one.”

The opposition Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf party, whose imprisoned leader Imran Khan remains the country’s most popular politician according to every credible poll, has framed the post-ceasefire boost in pointedly skeptical terms. PTI Secretary General Omar Ayub Khan told a news conference in Lahore on Tuesday that the government’s “diplomatic victory lap” obscured an unchanged domestic crisis. “The rupee is still where it was, electricity tariffs are still climbing, and the same people who could not run the gas distribution network six weeks ago are now telling us they will run a Gulf trade corridor,” he said. “Pakistanis will judge this government on bills, not on bulletins from Islamabad.”

The civil-military balance underwriting the mediation effort has also drawn scrutiny. Army Chief General Asim Munir, who attended several of the closed sessions of the Islamabad talks and traveled twice to Riyadh during the negotiation window, has not publicly addressed the post-ceasefire economic agenda. But two defense officials, speaking on condition of anonymity to describe internal coordination, said the General Headquarters in Rawalpindi had endorsed the corridor framework on the understanding that the army’s logistics arm would retain a stake in the Gwadar-side terminal operations. The arrangement, the officials said, formalized a working relationship that has carried over from the army-backed Special Investment Facilitation Council launched in 2023.

Markets have offered an early endorsement. The Karachi Stock Exchange’s KSE-100 index closed Tuesday at a record 92,440, up 1.4 percent on the day and roughly 18 percent above its March 28 close. The rupee firmed to 273.6 per dollar, its strongest level since November, and yields on Pakistan’s 2031 dollar bond have tightened by 180 basis points since the ceasefire announcement. Bilal Khan, a senior economist at Standard Chartered in Karachi, said the rally reflected “a meaningful repricing of Pakistan’s external risk” but cautioned that “the funding gap for the fiscal year starting in July has not changed because diplomats have been on television.”

Sharif’s coalition partners have moved to claim a share of the credit. Pakistan Peoples Party chairman Bilawal Bhutto Zardari, whose party holds the foreign affairs portfolio and provides parliamentary support to the PML-N government, told a rally in Sukkur on Monday evening that the Islamabad framework had vindicated his party’s argument that Pakistan should speak as a bridge between Tehran, Riyadh and Washington rather than choose between them. Coalition strategists have begun discussing whether the prestige dividend can be sustained into the autumn, when by-elections in seven National Assembly constituencies will offer the first electoral test of the post-ceasefire alignment.

European and Gulf diplomats have so far been receptive to the Pakistani pitch. The European Investment Bank, in a statement issued in Luxembourg on Tuesday, said it would dispatch a technical mission to Islamabad in May to examine financing instruments for reconstruction-related logistics infrastructure. Saudi Finance Minister Mohammed Al-Jadaan, in a brief readout of a phone call with Aurangzeb, said the kingdom remained “supportive of Pakistan’s macroeconomic stabilization” and would consider extending the maturity on $3 billion in deposits held at the State Bank of Pakistan. Iraqi officials, for their part, have asked Islamabad to second up to 200 customs and port-management specialists to Umm Qasr and Basra under a yet-to-be-announced bilateral training agreement.

Pakistani officials said the prime minister would convene a special session of his cabinet committee on the economy next Monday to formalize the Washington brief and approve the Gulf corridor framework for signature at the Marseille reconstruction conference on May 6. A senior official in the prime minister’s office said the government expected to be in a position to announce additional measures, including a revised privatization timeline for Pakistan International Airlines, before the end of the week.