Cables from Kabul: The Inside Story of the West’s Afghanistan Campaign. Sherard Cowper-Coles

we should be trying to keep it open, but in a controlled and benign fashion. That would enable both sides more easily to detect and deter the more nefarious cross-border traffic, in fighters and weapons and drugs.

      Quite early on, stressing that I had no instructions from London on this point, I floated ideas on these lines with President Karzai. He looked suspicious but interested. I reminded him that Britain had negotiated for some three decades with an Irish Republic, Article One of whose constitution (amended only in 1999) had laid claim to British sovereign territory (‘The national territory consists of the whole island of Ireland …’). But that had not stopped us talking, in a mature fashion, about common-sense ways of addressing the double majority/minority problem. I was sure that, with goodwill, US and UN support and plenty of time, a similar approach was the only way of addressing the problems of the Pashtun areas. Months later I was delighted to discover that Bill Wood’s predecessor in Afghanistan, US Ambassador Ron Neumann, and the American Institute for Afghan Studies (in a report published in November 2007) had separately reached similar conclusions. Karzai did not bite: his Government had neither the political strength nor, at that stage, the strategic vision to do so. Neither did the Americans, who listened politely but had other fish to fry.