AP Photo

On Thursday, we saw a face of Gordon Brown that rarely appears in the papers any more.

In the morning, his big silhouette strode across Green Park to Lancaster House, where he launched a conference that brought Afghan President Hamid Karzai together with the foreign ministers of more than 60 countries and the heads of most international bodies to find a plausible end to the Afghan war.

When he called the gathering in November, it seemed a political gimmick. But through weeks of deft negotiations, Mr. Brown managed to extract an unprecedented consensus, albeit an awkward one, that has all the participants aiming for the same goals for the first time in the conflict's history.