Aaron David Miller

You can't do this stuff on the back of a cocktail napkin.

You can't do it on a cell phone.

You can't do it however well-intentioned the Pakistanis may be.

And they have clear interests.

Eighty-plus percent of Pakistan's oil comes from Iran.

Not to mention food imports and a variety of other commodities.

You need to do direct negotiations.

I know 21 hours might seem like a long time.

I remember Camp David in 2000.

Ehud Barak, Bill Clinton, and Yasser Arafat.

I mean, we spent 12 hours on one issue alone.

And frankly, the issues are so complicated that you need direct negotiations.

Mediators can facilitate, but they can't serve to actually negotiate on behalf of the party.

So no, I wasn't surprised, nor was I surprised that the terms of this ceasefire were not understood by each side to be quite the same.

They were.

And the fact that the president referred publicly to the fact that they served as a basis for negotiations, I'm sure upset a large number of people who basically saw most of the points as non-negotiable.

Certainly, Israelis saw it that way.

But then the administration basically discarded it.

It had its own 15 points initially, to which the Iranians proposed five.

So you ended up with 15 to 5 to 10 negotiations.