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of an Afghanistan at peace with itself and its neighbors. You could build on the consensus that Afghanistan should never constitute a threat to any of its neighbors, and that its neighbors in return should not use Afghanistan to wage proxy wars against one another. These were broad principles that could serve as the basis for concrete agreements. For instance, Pakistan might well demand formal recognition of the DurandLine as its border with Afghanistan—a recognition that the Afghans have never agreed to accord this ill-marked international frontier. 7 The positive security implications of such recognition would give Islamabad a reason to agree to a lesser role in Afghanistan. Pakistan’s meddling in Afghanistan (supporting the insurgency and interfering with U.S. COIN strategy) has been in plain sight for all to see, but not so Afghanistan’s refusal to abandon claims to Pakistani territory, claims that form one motivation for Pakistan’s desire to meddle in Afghanistan.
    Holbrooke pursued this idea of bringing the Afghans and Pakistanis to see mutual benefit with a vengeance, which is one reason why Kabul looked at him with suspicion and accused him of favoring Pakistan. On one occasion, he pressed Pakistan’s top military man, General Kayani, on what it would take for his country to give up on the Taliban. The general did not want to acknowledge that Pakistan was supporting the Taliban but nevertheless took the bait. He put it hypothetically and listed a few conditions. Right after “Afghanistan should not be an Indian base for operations against Pakistan” came “Pashtuns in Afghanistan should look to Kabul, and Pashtuns in Pakistan to Islamabad,” by which he meant that Karzai (or any future Afghan leader) should stop posing as the “King of all Pashtuns” and Afghanistan should abandon its irredentist claims to Pakistan’s Pashtun region.
    That all sounded reasonable. Pakistan was waging a preemptive war of sorts in Afghanistan. Islamabad wanted Kabul on the defensive and Pashtuns under the thumb of its friend the Taliban lest Afghanistan start causing problems in Pakistan.
    The next stop was Kabul. In several meetings with Afghan ministers, Holbrooke went off script to talk about the Durand Line. He got no takers. In one meeting, after Afghanistan’s interior and defense ministers and intelligence chief were done complaining about Pakistan, Holbrooke told them General Kayani had said that if Afghanistan recognized the Durand Line, then Pakistan would have no reason to invest in the Taliban (he embellished Kayani’s promise, but it was close enough). The three Afghans were caught off guard. They were accustomed to complaining about terrorist-sheltering Pakistan, but not being on the receiving end of a Pakistani complaint. Amrallah Saleh—Afghanistan’s seasoned spymaster and most lucid strategic thinker—leaned forward,looked Holbrooke straight in the eye, and said, “That is not politically feasible, no Afghan government would do that.” But to Holbrooke, that was an opening.
    Saleh had just confirmed to Holbrooke that the core issue between the two governments—and hence a major driver of the insurgency that we were spending billions to contain—was a diplomatic matter. There was a diplomatic solution to this war. Of course a resolution would not be easy or immediate, but there was a path to a diplomatic resolution of what motivated Pakistan’s destructive game in Afghanistan. Diplomacy could create an overlap in the Afghanistan-Pakistan portion of the Venn diagram.
    Of course, Holbrooke could not start with the border issue. That was not on Washington’s radar, and there had to be a few smaller agreements between Kabul and Islamabad before you got to the border issue. Kabul thought that America would control the Afghan border as a part of COIN, and Pakistan resisted COIN precisely because it would eliminate Islamabad’s trump card without resolving one important issue that got Pakistan into