With Pakistani, Afghan, and Western officials’ failure to mediate, the Pashtunistan debate subsided into an uneasy impasse. Nevertheless, the Afghan–Pakistan borderlands remained in the spotlight – this time because of global politics. The United States and its Cold War struggles dominated the early and mid-1950s. As U.S. officials increasingly sought extra-European allies to curtail the Soviet Union's influence, Pakistani leaders desperately pursued U.S. aid to bolster their country's wheezing economy and bedraggled military defenses. Northwestern Pakistan's strategic importance provided a key selling point: U.S. strategists, like their British colonial predecessors, adopted the view that the frontier tribal area and neighboring North-West Frontier Province (NWFP) stood at the strategic gateway between East and West – and thus needed incorporation into broader defense schemes. Just as the preceding chapter argued against earlier histories that have focused on the 1953 U.S.–Pakistan arms deal as the key moment in the United States’ postcolonial relationship with South Asia, instead identifying the border crisis between Afghanistan and Pakistan as a crucial instigator of U.S. regional interests, so this chapter also diverges from the dominant scholarship by emphasizing the key importance of the Afghan–Pakistan borderlands in U.S. South Asia policy: after all, the NWFP and frontier tribal area offered the most strategic regional base for any U.S. attack against the Soviets. By focusing on this region, it adds to the growing scholarship about the small yet influential “hot wars” taking place on the Cold War's peripheries.

As in other regions of the decolonizing world, U.S. strategists quickly foundered, as they struggled to untangle regional disputes while building a secure Cold War foundation. Pakistani politicians wrestling to establish a stable state, which incorporated Pakistan's diverse population, flinched from Indian and Afghan threats, real and imagined. Afghan leaders, whose pleas for military and economic aid U.S. leaders spurned, focused again on the Pashtunistan dispute to increase their regional influence. Meanwhile Pakistan's internal conflicts drove the central government to amalgamate Punjab, Sindh, Balochistan, and the NWFP – and implicitly the neighboring frontier tribal area – into a single political unit. As a consequence, war nearly broke out between Afghanistan and Pakistan. U.S. officials soon demonstrated they had learned little from their first mediation attempt between Afghanistan and Pakistan.