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and many Afghans favored talking to them. A deal that would sever ties between the Taliban and al-Qaeda and bring peace in Afghanistan was within reach. Holbrooke asked Rubin to put his ideas into a series of memos that Holbrooke then fanned out across the government. After Holbrooke died Rubin put all those memos into one folder for the White House. Then, in early spring of 2012 in a meeting at the White House, Clinton pushed the White House one more time to consider the idea. National Security Adviser Tom Donilon countered that he had yet to see the State Department make a case for reconciliation. So Clinton asked Rubin for every memo he had written on reconciliation going back to his first day on the job. The three-inch-thick folder spoke for itself. It took over a year of lobbying inside the administration to get the White House to take seriously the idea of reconciliation. It was close to eighteen months after Rubin wrote his first memo that Clinton could finally, and publicly, endorse diplomacy on behalf of the administration, in a speech at the Asia Society in February 2011.
    Reconciliation involved more than Karzai and the Taliban, however. Holbrooke thought that a political settlement between them was possible if Afghanistan’s key neighbors (Iran and Pakistan) and other important regional actors (India, Russia, and Saudi Arabia) could be induced to support it. Iran had backed the last political settlement in Afghanistan, the Bonn Conference of 2001. Pakistan had not been a part of that deal, but its acquiescence was bought afterward with generous American aid. This time Iran was not part of the equation, but Holbrooke hoped that Pakistan would go along much as Iran had done at Bonn if Washington actively engaged Islamabad. You needed at least one of the two—Iran or Pakistan—for a settlement to have a chance.
    It was important to tackle the problem from the outside in because all these countries had vital interests in Afghanistan, and unless theyendorsed the process and its outcome, it would fail. In addition, America would eventually leave, and then it would be up to those neighbors and regional actors to keep the final deal in place. They would do that only if they had been included in the process all along and saw their interests protected in the final political settlement. America’s job was to get the region on board with a peace process and commit to protecting its outcome. That perspective never grew roots in Washington. Even when the White House warmed up to the concept of talking to the Taliban it saw diplomacy as hardly more than a cease-fire agreement with the Taliban.
    But there were deep divisions between Pakistan and India, Iran and Saudi Arabia, and less visible but equally important disagreements separating Iran and Russia, on the one hand, from Pakistan on the other. During the Taliban period in the 1990s, these countries had supported different warring factions, and they would do so again, scuttling any final settlement unless they were on board with what Karzai and the Taliban agreed on.
    Holbrooke thought that, as varied as the interests of these regional actors were, it should nonetheless be possible to bring them into alignment. He imagined a Venn diagram in which all the circles would intersect; the small area where they all overlapped would be where the agreement would have to happen. His approach was reminiscent of how Nixon thought of diplomacy with China. Before he got to Beijing in February 1972, Nixon took a pad of paper and jotted on it: “What do they want, what do we want, what do we both want?” Whatever he thought the answer was to that last question was where he anchored his China diplomacy. 6
    The most obvious area of overlap regarding Afghanistan was that no one (not even Pakistan), regardless of what other interests they wanted to protect there, wanted to see chaos and extremism reigning in the country. The logical thing to do was to get everyone to agree on the principle