While the overlooked war in Afghanistan grinds on, a group of officials in Washington, Kabul and Islamabad are exploring a strategy that would narrow each side’s demands to a set of minimum conditions for escaping the current dead end.

The aim is to create a pathway for the withdrawal of U.S. and NATO troops from a war that almost nobody sees as “winnable” by military force alone. The goal is a framework for political transition where each side’s demands are boiled down to the irreducible essentials.

U.S. officials involved in the informal discussions liken this approach to the 1993 Downing Street Declaration on Northern Ireland that created space to negotiate the 1998 Good Friday Agreement that ended the civil conflict there.

U.S. officials have explored such an approach with Gen. Ehsan Ul-Haq, a former chief of the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence directorate and a former chairman of the Pakistani joint chiefs of staff. He outlined his seven-point “road map” during a recent conversation at the Nixon Center in Washington. The aim of this exercise, he said, was to focus on political transition, rather than the military impasse.

Haq sees two baseline U.S. demands: No al- Qaida forces in Afghanistan, and no return to the Taliban’s oppressive policies toward women. The Taliban, according to Haq, has just one irreducible demand: no more foreign forces in Afghanistan.

These minimum conditions for the two main combatants can probably be met, argues Haq.

Haq’s road map also addresses the core demands of other parties: for Afghanistan’s Tajik and Hazara communities, he would stress reconstruction and economic assistance, as well as a broad process of national reconciliation — for which the Omar’s Eid statement also indicated support.

To calm the region, Haq proposed a kind of Afghan neutrality, with no foreign interference.

And to address Pakistan’s anxieties, he proposed that Afghanistan take back its millions of refugees who fled the war, and the two countries jointly establish a border that is “hardened, regulated and stabilized.”

While Haq’s formula emerged through a private “Track Two” process, similar discussions have taken place among a “core group” that includes the United States, Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Pakistani Foreign Minister Hina Rabbani Khar disclosed the confidential three-way talks last month, and officials say the Pakistanis are urging the Taliban to enter negotiations.

The Pakistanis evidently have concluded that a negotiated political transition is better for their security than the alternative of a ragged transition and possible civil war. One small success of the core group is that Pakistan, Afghanistan and the United States have agreed on arranging “safe passage” so that Taliban leaders can attend peace discussions inside Afghanistan.

The frustration of the Afghan War has been dramatized by the sharp increase recently in “green on blue” killings of NATO forces by the Afghan security forces they’re supposedly trying to help.

Given the dead end in Afghanistan, you might think that the war there — and strategies for ending it — would be a big topic in the U.S. presidential campaign.

Sadly, soldiers and diplomats continue to operate in a political vacuum, and the candidates act as if the brutal Afghanistan conflict will somehow solve itself.

— The Day of New London (Conn.)