Discussing the pitfalls of tying U.S. policy in Pakistan and Afghanistan to meddling in the Kashmir dispute, I noted the unfortunate tendency in U.S. foreign policy debate to create unnecessary links between different, unconnected issues in the same region as prelude to a supposedly “comprehensive” solution. Via Yglesias, I see that Peter Berkowitz has given a perfect example of how this works in commentary on Israel and Palestine. The parallels between “grand bargain” arguments related to Pakistan and Berkowitz’s argument about Israel and Palestine are striking, and this reflects important structural similarities between the two cases. In both cases you have hard-line defenders of an occupation who want to use an unrelated regional security matter to advance their objectives in the occupied territory. In the Israeli case, invoking Iran is a way of distracting attention from its own policies and claiming that nothing can be done in the territories until Iranian intervention stops and the Iranian threat is neutralized. This is mostly a delaying maneuver, but it is also a way to channel international attention away from the territories and towards Iran, which is something else hard-liners would like to see. Suddenly, it is not perpetuation of settlements that makes negotiations extremely difficult, but Iranian intervention, which loads up the agenda for any negotiations with so many extraneous issues related to Iran’s position in the region that any progress on relevant issues is sure to be thwarted. In the Pakistani case, the military floats the idea of outside mediation in Kashmir and uses promises to increase pressure on the Taliban as leverage to win concessions that it could otherwise never hope to win, and then uses the “failure” to make progress on the unrelated Kashmir dispute a justification for its “inability” to do more in western Pakistan. Unfortunately, there is every reason to think that Washington will buy into both of these misdirections.