By William Maclean, Security Correspondent
GENEVA, Sept 10 (Reuters) - The United States should share the job of getting an Afghan "political endgame" with regional powers, recognising they have more at stake than Washington, former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger said on Friday.
In a speech to a Geneva meeting of Britain's International Institute for Strategic Studies, the veteran former architect of U.S. foreign policy said this approach would also be a more realistic reflection of new constraints on U.S. global power.
"Starting this effort soon is the best way, and may be the only way, to bring this to a conclusion," Kissinger, who negotiated the Vietnam peace accords, told the gathering of diplomats, military officers and strategists.
Kissinger named China, India, Pakistan, Uzbekistan and Iran as among countries that had "a more vital interest in a stable and coherent Afghan state than does the United States."
"I have supported our administration's policy in Afghanistan but it will have to merge at some point into some kind of political endgame," he said, adding that an "essentially unilateral" American role could not be a long-term solution.
"The long term solution must involve a consortium of countries in defining, protecting and guaranteeing a definition of a staus quo Afghanistan compatible with its piece of the world."
With violence in Afghanistan is at its worst since the Taliban were overthrown in late 2001, Obama administration officials are struggling to measure success in the nine-year-old war before a December strategy review.
While the United States and its allies have long wanted regional players to cooperate in bringing stability to Afghanistan, rivalries among some countries have complicated the effort.
Kissinger did not address these tensions but suggested there was a common need in the region's countries to protect their societies against transnational militant violence.
"The presence of a terrorist-reproducing state in that location will affect every country," he said, adding this could undermine "whatever order exists today" in Pakistan.
Pakistan has long played an important role in Afghan affairs, having nurtured the Afghan Taliban during the 1990s, but Kabul remains suspicious that Islamabad is pursuing its own agenda in the country to the detriment of Afghanistan.
And both India and Pakistan have for decades vied for influence in Afghanistan, an unstable, but geopolitically vital, country both see as important to their security.
As secretary of state under Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, Kissinger shaped policies behind major world events of the 1970s, like the Vietnam peace accord, the reopening of U.S.-China relations, growing Arab-Israeli contacts and U.S.-Soviet arms control talks.
His official career waned with Nixon's decline in the Watergate scandal. Critics say Kissinger bears responsibility for the carpet-bombing of Cambodia during the Vietnam War.
But Kissinger has continued to be an independent diplomatic influence and runs an international consulting company. (Reporting by William Maclean, Editing by Angus MacSwan)
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