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Article 1. The Washington Post Avoiding a summer of blood David Ignatius June 22 -- “Peace is at hand,” Henry Kissinger famously announced in October 1972 after a seeming breakthrough in Vietnam negotiations. But it wasn’t at hand. It took three more months to complete the Paris Peace Accords, which collapsed in 1975 when North Vietnam overran Saigon. This Vietnam history is a caution against premature optimism about diplomatic solutions to deeply embedded conflicts, such as the one in Afghanistan. But the fact remains, as is so often stated, that there is no military solution to such conflicts. The challenge is creating a dialogue among people who profoundly mistrust each other — and averting a pell-mell civil war. President Obama is embracing the logic of a political settlement for Afghanistan with his speech Wednesday night. With Osama bin Laden dead, Obama can claim that America’s core mission of combating al-Qaeda is succeeding. He can bring some troops home and step up diplomatic negotiations with the Taliban to reach a broad peace deal by 2014. Obama’s strategy for the Afghanistan negotiations highlights two factors that could also be relevant in the increasingly messy conflicts in Libya and Syria. First, the dialogue must be sponsored by people inside the country that’s facing internal strife. The United States may encourage contacts, but the process has to be “Afghan-led,” or “Libyan-led,” or “Syrian-led.” Second, this dialogue requires a regional framework, so that the combatants don’t turn to meddling neighbors for help. HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_030157