LIKE individuals, nations have a style, an attitude and an outlook. They are reflected most strikingly in the style of their diplomacy. Our region is at a crossroads today. Afghanistan holds the key to regional peace; so does Iran. The United States' diplomacy on both will make the big difference between peace and protracted conflict.

Last Tuesday, on Jan 24, Yale University Press published a book with stunning revelations, based on official records and briefings. In May 2010, Turkey and Brazil had successfully negotiated with Iran an accord on the nuclear question, the Tehran Declaration. It was in conformity with a letter to the mediators by President Barack Obama.

Iran would have parted with 1,200kg of low-enriched uranium, about a half of its stockpile as a prelude to a wider accord. The US scuttled it and instead drummed up support in the UN Security Council for sanctions against Iran. The book's title is A Single Roll of the Dice and its author is a highly respected scholar Trita Parsi who is frequently consulted by western and Asian governments.

In an earlier book Treacherous Alliance he had exposed how the US rebuffed Iran's overture for peace in May 2003, made through Swiss ambassador Tim Guldimann.

It is a certain mindset which inspires such behaviour. It was explained by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton: “It's only after we pass sanctions in the Security Council that Iran will negotiate in good faith.” Since Iran had already demonstrated its good faith, by accepting the declaration, a fact the mediators accepted, she implied clearly that the US would force Iran to yield further under duress.

As an American official told Trita Parsi, the impression was created that “we could not take yes for an answer”. Prof Nicholas Burns noted last week that “we have not had a serious and sustained negotiation with the Iranian government in more than 30 years”.

This policy has a long pedigree. On Feb 8, 1950 Secretary of State Dean Acheson said that the United States' policy was, indeed, to bring about understandings, but “by creating situations so strong that they can be recognised and out of them can grow agreement”. On Feb 16, he spoke of the need “to create situations of strength”. Thus was born the doctrine of 'negotiation from strength'. After the collapse of the USSR the doctrine acquired menacing nuances. They would doom the US parleys with the Taliban to failure.

The omens are not propitious. On Jan 3, both the White House and the State Department welcomed the Taliban's decision to open a political office in Qatar to provide an address for talks. There is, however, a long road to travel before negotiations can begin in earnest.

For, the White House Press Secretary Jay Carney's remarks suggest that the US believes that the Taliban are a spent force and are suing for peace in sack cloth and ashes. The conditions he stipulated reveal the mindset of old. “…[S]tandards for reconciliation have not changed — the conditions, rather, that insurgents who are willing to lay down their arms and reconcile, must meet in order to be accepted by the Afghan government and by us.”

He amplified: “And we've always said that Taliban reconciliation would only come on the condition of breaking from Al Qaeda, abandoning violence and abiding by the Afghan constitution, and that remains the case.”

As Britain's former ambassador to Afghanistan Sherard Cowper-Coles mentions in his book Cables from Kabul , the constitution was “drafted by a Frenchman and imposed by an American that was out of sync with Afghan political realities. A constitution which imposes something like 14 separate national elections in 20 years is not really sustainable, politically or economically”. It could “last only as long as the West was prepared to stay in Afghanistan to prop up the present disposition”. To the Taliban this is a non-negotiable demand. It wants all the foreign troops to leave.

The basic assumptions underlying the US 'conditions' are all wrong. The Taliban had never been defeated in 2001-02 and is not negotiating now from a position of weakness. Quite the contrary. More to the point, it was a wholly unnecessary war for the US to launch — 9/11 was a horrendous act of terrorism; but it was not an act of aggression by the state of Afghanistan. It is as absurd to declare 'war on terror' as it is to declare war on evil.

After 9/11 the tide was turning against Osama bin Laden and ways were being debated in Kandahar on his expulsion without loss of face. Time was needed, which “western governments thirsting for violent revenge were not prepared to give”. Two Asian and Muslim countries, Afghanistan and Iraq, were wantonly devastated and laid to waste by the US and its allies with grave consequences for the peace of the region; especially the immediate neighbours including Pakistan and Iran. That was aggression.

In both cases, negotiations provided an option; in both it was spurned and continues still to be spurned. The Qatar parleys do not inspire much confidence. This is not a bilateral matter between the US and the Taliban — a quest for a face-saver by the US to cover its ignominious retreat after the failure of a venture of criminal folly. This is a matter which concerns the countries whose peace and stability that venture undermined with grave consequences to their well-being.

With Sherard Cowper-Coles one cannot help asking “whether Obama's America is up for the challenge of driving such a process forward with all the political and diplomatic resources such a strategy would require”. Does it have the vision to take that path of peace and the stamina to stay the course?

The writer is an author and a lawyer based in Mumbai.