[Reader-list] The Back Channel / The New Yorker

[Sanjay Kak]

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/03/02/090302fa_fact_coll

It helps to notice that in this rather lengthy exposition by Steve
Coll, some key historical events get a miss:
- the US governments support for the Mujahideen in their crusade
against the Soviets;
- the more recent US invasion of Afghanistan;
- most recently, in its discussion of Kashmir, the absence of any
mention of the summer of protests in 2008.
- and while discussing at lentgth the growth of the Islamic Right in
Pakistan, the complete omission of the simultaneous growth of the
Hindu Right in India.

Steve Coll, incidentally, is the President & CEO of the New America
Foundation. Their Board of Directors includes such luminaries as
Francis Fukuyama, Lenny Mendonca (Chairman, McKinsey Global
Institute), Eric Schmidt (Chairman & CEO, Google, Inc.), and of
course, our very own, Fareed Zakaria, Editor, Newsweek International

Best

Sanjay Kak

_________

The Back Channel

By Steve Coll, New America Foundation
The New Yorker | March 2, 2009

Negotiators involved in the secret back channel regarded the effort as
politically risky and exceptionally ambitious--a potential turning
point in history, as one official put it. Two years ago, Pervez
Musharraf, who was then Pakistan’s President and Army chief, summoned
his most senior generals and two Foreign Ministry
officials to a series of meetings at his military office in
Rawalpindi. There, they reviewed the progress of a secret, sensitive
negotiation with India, known to its participants as “the back
channel.” For several years, special envoys from Pakistan and India
had been holding talks in hotel rooms in Bangkok, Dubai, and London.
Musharraf and Manmohan Singh, the Prime Minister of India, had
encouraged the negotiators to seek what some involved called a
“paradigm shift” in relations between the two nations.

The agenda included a search for an end to the long fight over
Kashmir, a contest that is often described by Western military
analysts as a potential trigger for atomic war. (India first tested a
nuclear weapon in 1974, and Pakistan did so in 1998.) Since achieving
independence, in 1947, India and Pakistan have fought three wars and
countless skirmishes across Kashmir’s mountain passes. The largest
part of the territory is occupied by India, and Pakistanis have long
rallied around the cause of liberating it. The two principal envoys--
for Pakistan, a college classmate of Musharraf ’s named Tariq Aziz,
and, for India, a Russia specialist named Satinder Lambah--were
developing what diplomats refer to as a “non-paper” on Kashmir, a text
without names or signatures which can serve as a deniable but detailed
basis for a deal.

At the Rawalpindi meetings, Musharraf drew his generals into a debate
about the fundamental definition of Pakistan’s national security. “It
was no longer fashionable to think in some of the old terms,” Khurshid
Kasuri, who was then Foreign Minister, and who attended the sessions,
recalled. “Pakistan had become a nuclear power. War was no longer an
option for either side.” Kasuri said to the generals that only by
diplomacy could they achieve their goals in Kashmir. He told them, he
recalled, “Put your hand here--on your heart-- and tell me that
Kashmir will gain freedom” without such a negotiation with India.

The generals at the table accepted this view, Kasuri said. They
“trusted Musharraf,” he continued. “Their raison d’être is not
permanent enmity with India. Their raison d’être is Pakistan’s
permanent security. And what is security? Safety of our borders and
our economic development.”

By early 2007, the back-channel talks on Kashmir had become “so
advanced that we’d come to semicolons,” Kasuri recalled. A senior
Indian official who was involved agreed. “It was huge--I think it
would have changed the basic nature of the problem,” he told me. “You
would have then had the freedom to remake Indo-Pakistani relations.”
Aziz and Lambah were negotiating the details for a visit to Pakistan
by the Indian Prime Minister during which, they hoped, the principles
underlying the Kashmir agreement would be announced and talks aimed at
implementation would be inaugurated. One quarrel, over a waterway
known as Sir Creek, would be formally settled.

Neither government, however, had done much to prepare its public for a
breakthrough. In the spring of 2007, a military aide in Musharraf ’s
office contacted a senior civilian official to ask how politicians,
the media, and the public might react. “We think we’re close to a
deal,” Musharraf ’s aide said, as this official recalled it. “Do you
think we can sell it?”

Regrettably, the time did not look ripe, this official recalled
answering. In early March, Musharraf had invoked his near-dictatorial
powers to fire the chief justice of the country’s highest court. That
decision set off rock-tossing protests by lawyers and political
activists. The General’s popularity seemed to be eroding by the day;
he had seized power in a coup in 1999, and had enjoyed public support
for several years, but now he was approaching “the point where he
couldn’t sell himself,” the official remembers saying, never mind a
surprise peace agreement with India.

Kasuri was among the Musharraf advisers who felt that the Pakistanis
should postpone the summit--that they “should not waste” the
negotiated draft agreements by revealing them when Musharraf might not
be able to forge a national consensus. Even if it became necessary to
hold off for months or years, Kasuri believed, “We had done so much
work that it will not be lost.”

Pakistan’s government sent a message to India: Manmohan Singh’s visit
should be delayed so that Musharraf could regain his political
balance. India, too, was facing domestic complications, in the form of
regional elections. In New Delhi, the word in national-security
circles had been that “any day we’re going to have an agreement on
Kashmir,” Gurmeet Kanwal, a retired Indian brigadier, recalled. “But
Musharraf lost his constituencies.”

Rather than recovering, the General slipped into a political death
spiral. Armed Islamist radicals took control of the Red Mosque, in
Islamabad, and, in July, Musharraf ordered a commando raid to expel
them. Sensing a political opening, the country’s two most popular
civilian politicians, Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif, whom Musharraf
had forced into exile, agitated to be allowed to return. By year’s
end, public pressure had forced Musharraf to give up his Army command.
A suicide bomber murdered Bhutto in a public park just a month later.
Her widower, Asif Zardari, led their political party to victory in an
election in which voters re pudiated Musharraf and his political
allies. In August, 2008, Musharraf resigned and retired from public
life.

In the sixty-one years of their existence, the governments of India
and Pakistan have periodically funded covert campaigns of guerrilla or
terrorist violence on each other’s soil; as a result, each now holds
unshakable assumptions about the other’s proclivity for dirty tricks.
In Pakistan, for example, it is an article of faith among many senior
Army officers that India’s foreign-intelligence service, the Research
and Analysis Wing, or R.A.W., is providing guns and money to ethnic
Baluch and Pashtun groups that operate along the Afghan border, and
who seek to separate from or overthrow the Pakistani government.
Equally, in India’s cabinet and parliament, it is taken for granted
that the Pakistan Army leadership provides aid to jihadi groups so
that they can carry out terrorist attacks on Indian soil--the latest
example being the band of ten young men who arrived in an inflatable
dinghy at Mumbai’s Badhwar Park last November 26th.

The Mumbai attackers carried G.P.S. navigational equipment, a
satellite telephone, cell phones suitable for local Mumbai networks,
grenades, Kalashnikovs, and 9-millimetre pistols, which they employed
to kill a hundred and sixty-five people, including six Americans,
during a three-day spree of nihilistic violence. More than most cells
that have turned up in India in recent years, the terrorists had
production values that seemed inspired by the September 11th attacks:
they struck at multiple sites in the heart of India’s financial
district and exploited live television and radio coverage.

Indian security services managed to intercept the attackers’ telephone
calls, and discovered that they were speaking to handlers in Pakistan.
The Indians assembled a dossier, containing excerpts of these
conversations, translated into English, which they presented to
Pakistan, the United States, and other governments; one version ran to
a hundred and eighteen pages. In one intercept, the terrorists rejoice
because television anchors are comparing their work to 9/11. In tone
and rhythm, the excerpts suggest something of the banality of
cellphone- enabled mass murder:

Caller: Let me talk to Umar.
Receiver: Note a number. Number is 0043720880764.
Caller: Whose number is this?
Receiver: It is mine. The phone is with me.
Caller: … Allah is helping you…. Try to set the place on fire.
Receiver: We have set fire in four rooms.
Caller: People shall run helter skelter when they see the flames. Keep
throwing a grenade every fifteen minutes or so. It will terrorize.
Here, talk to “Baba.”
Caller (2): A lot of policemen and Navy personnel have covered the
entire area. Be brave!

The dossier leaves little doubt that the attack originated in
Pakistan: a man using a Pakistani passport paid for the terrorists’
phone services; their pis- tols were engraved with a manufacturer’s
address in Peshawar; and numer-ous provisions recovered from a fishing
trawler that the group used to reach Mumbai from Karachi were made in
Pakistan.

More specifically, the Indian government’s dossier concludes that the
Mumbai attack was coördinated by Lashkare- Taiba, or the Army of the
Pure—a Pakistan-based, Saudi-influenced Islamist terrorist and
guerrilla force that fights mainly in Kashmir. A decade ago, Lashkar’s
emir, Hafiz Saeed, announced his intention to destroy India: “We will
not rest until the whole [of ] India is dissolved into Pakistan.”
After the Mumbai attack, Saeed delivered a public sermon in Lahore in
which he spoke approvingly of a new “awakening” among Indian Muslims,
and described his coreligionists as “second to none in taking
revenge.” A satellite-telephone conversation between one of the Mumbai
terrorists and a supervisor in Pakistan, intercepted independently by
the United States, also points to Lashkar’s involvement in the raid.

After many weeks of prevarication, Pakistani officials conceded that
the Mumbai attackers appear to have come from their country. Pakistan
has detained and filed criminal charges against at least one senior
Lashkar commander named in the Indian dossier. But it remains unclear
how far Pakistan will go to dismantle Lashkar. Since the early
nineteen-nineties, Pakistan’s principal military-intelligence service,
Inter-Services Intelligence, or I.S.I., has armed and funded Lashkar
to foment upheaval in Indian-held Kashmir. Although many of Pakistan’s
generals are secular or apolitically religious, they have sponsored
jihadis as a low-cost means of keeping India off balance.

The historical ties between Lashkar and the Pakistani security
services are for the most part undisputed; one book that describes
them, published in 2005 and entitled “Between Mosque and Military,”
was written by Husain Haqqani, who is currently Pakistan’s Ambassador
to the United States. However, Brigadier Nazir Butt, a defense attaché
at the Embassy in Washington, denied that his government had provided
lethal aid to Lashkar or to other violent groups. “Pakistan only
extended moral and diplomatic support to the Kashmiri struggle for
self-determination,” he said. “After 9/11, Pakistan withdrew all its
support for Kashmiri organizations and, as a consequence, drew violent
attacks on its military and national leadership.”

American officials, who rely upon the I.S.I.’s coöperation in their
campaigns against Al Qaeda and the Taliban along the
Pakistan-Afghanistan border, continue to say that there is no evidence
that active I.S.I. personnel participated in or knew in advance about
the Mumbai strike. Yet critical evidence, such as interrogations
conducted in Pakistan, is effectively under I.S.I. control; agents
from the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which has jurisdiction in
the matter under U.S. law, because American citizens were among the
victims, have been denied direct access to the Lashkar suspects.

It’s also true that Pakistan’s government has itself been on the
receiving end of jihadi attacks in the past year. “It’s not as if all
this stuff is external and going into India,” one official from a nato
government said. “They don’t have the capacity to defend Islamabad and
Peshawar. They’re losing ground.” Taliban-led insurgents today control
large swaths of territory in Pakistan’s northwest, where they enforce
a brutal regime of Islamic justice, and recently signed a truce with
the government in the Swat valley. They have mounted a bombing
campaign that has reached Islamabad; some of the bombs have been aimed
at the Army and the I.S.I., suggesting a loss of control by the I.S.I.
over its jihadi clients, or a split within the Pakistani security
services, or both.

In January, Prime Minister Singh remarked that the Mumbai attack could
not have been carried out without “the support of some official
agencies in Pakistan.” India nevertheless reacted to the attack with
relative restraint. Singh’s government has not ordered a major
military mobilization, nor has it launched any retaliatory strikes
against Pakistan. Were it not for the back-channel talks, the response
might not have been so measured: Singh and at least some of his
civilian counterparts in Pakistan hope to find their way back to the
non-paper. But this will be possible only if jihadis don’t provoke a
war first.

Many Indian politicians and security analysts continue to call for
military action. Some predicted to me that additional jihadi attacks
would take place during India’s upcoming national election, in May; if
such strikes do occur, they said, it would be difficult for India’s
democratic government to resist public calls for retaliation. For now,
however, the decisions belong to Singh, a seventysix- year-old
Cambridge-educated econ- omist who recently underwent heartbypass
surgery. Singh’s decision-making appears to be grounded in military
realism; if India were to launch even selective strikes, it would
likely only deepen Pakistan’s internal turmoil and thus exacerbate the
terrorist threat faced by India. Any Indian military action would also
risk an escalation that could include nuclear deployments--which may
be precisely what the jihadi leaders hoped to provoke. “There is no
military option here,” Lalit Mansingh, a former Indian Ambassador in
Washington, said. India had to “isolate the terrorist elements” in
Pakistan, he said, not “rally the nation around them.”

Negotiators involved in the secret back channel regarded the effort as
politically risky and exceptionally ambitious— a potential turning
point in history, as one official put it, comparable to the peace
forged between Germany and France after the Second World War. At
issue, they believed, was not just a settlement in Kashmir itself but
an end to their debilitating covert wars and, eventually, their
paranoiac mutual suspicions. They hoped to develop a new regime of
free trade and political coöperation in the region, from Central Asia
to Bangladesh. On January 8, 2007, at the height of this optimistic
interval, Manmohan Singh remarked in public, “I dream of a day, while
retaining our respective national identities, one can have breakfast
in Amritsar, lunch in Lahore, and dinner in Kabul.”

These hopes, however quixotic, reflected a competition between two
schools of radical thought: the millenarian terrorism of jihadi groups
and their supporters; and the less well-known search by sections of
the Indian and Pakistani élites for a transformational peace. For both
groups, Kashmir is symbolically and ideologically important. It is
also, still, a territory of grinding, unfinished war.

Indian paramilitaries had placed Srinagar under an undeclared curfew
on the morning this winter when I sought to drive out of the city,
which is the summer capital of India’s Jammu and Kashmir state. I
wanted to visit a gravedigger in the northern sector of the Kashmir
Valley, about fifteen miles from the heavily militarized de-facto
border between India and Pakistan known as the Line of Control.

Soldiers in overcoats and olive helmets huddled at checkpoints before
open fires; they waved tree branches or batons to stop cars for
inspection. The Indian troops on occupation duty in Kashmir-- about
five hundred thousand soldiers and paramilitaries--rarely speak the
Kashmiri dialect. Locals resent them, and they return the attitude. I
was travelling with a Kashmiri journalist, Basharat Peer, who is the
author of a forthcoming book, “Curfewed Nights,” a coming-of-age
narrative set amid the region’s revolts and security crackdowns.
Basharat’s press credentials had expired, but he had recently
completed a fellowship at Columbia University, and he had his library
card; at difficult moments, we thrust it through the window and
shouted “New York!,” as if it trumped all rules--and, each time, the
soldiers backed off and waved us through.

We passed north, through rice paddies and apple
orchards--hauntedlooking rows of barren trees. On the horizon rose the
snowy ridges of Himalayan foothills. Convoys of troop carriers, water
haulers, military tow trucks, and jeeps clogged the highway until we
turned down an embankment to the village of Chahal, a hamlet of
perhaps a hundred tin-roofed houses among terraced fields beside the
Jhelum River.

Kashmiri villagers inhabit a political space confined by roaming
guerrillas on one side--some of them local boys, some foreign jihadis
from Pakistan--and by Indian troops on the other. At the top of a
hill, we found the residue of India’s counter-insurgency campaign: a
new concrete school and clinic, constructed by India’s government to
appease the villagers, and beside it, encircled by barbed wire, a
field of muddy dunes that held the unmarked graves of about two
hundred young men whose unidentified bodies had been delivered for
burial by the Indian Army.

Just under a thousand graves containing the corpses of unknown young
men have been discovered in Kashmir so far by investigators from the
Association of Parents of Disappeared Persons, a small advocacy
organization in Srinagar. Last year, a grenade was tossed at the house
of the lawyer who advises the group; he and his colleagues have
expanded their field surveys nonetheless. They believe that the bodies
they have found are among about eight thousand young men who have gone
missing during the latest round of Kashmir’s wars; they hypothesize
that Indian security forces detained many of the victims insecret
prisons, tortured them, and shot them. Indian officials reject these
allegations; they have estimated the number of missing Kashmiri men at
about four thousand, and speculated that they left for Pakistan for
training so that they could fight against India, only to fall in
combat when they returned.

In a small stone house, I met Atta Muhammad Khan, a slight man with a
trimmed white beard, who is the guardian of Chahal’s tombs of unknown
rebels. His work began in the late spring of 2002, he told me, when a
Kashmiri policeman arrived in the village with a corpse in a truck.
The policeman said that the victim was a Pakistani-supported militant
who had been shot dead in battle. “They started bringing bodies every
ten days, eight days, fifteen days, at times twice in one day,” Khan
said.

Villages such as Chahal that are known to contain such graves have
become magnets for Kashmiri families who are looking for missing sons.
When family members arrive bearing photographs or other scraps of
evidence, Khan will exhume bodies for them. The gravedigger is himself
a searcher; his nephew, whom he raised, disappeared in 2002.

The Kashmir problem has a textbook quality: a dispute of more than six
decades’ duration, involving British colonial concessions, United
Nations resolutions, and a long record of formal negotiations. But it
is the character of the war within Kashmir--the torture centers, the
unmarked graves, and the remorseless violence of the jihadis--that
better describes the contours of Indo- Pakistani enmity today. In one
sense, the recent back-channel talks, with their promise of a
cleansing peace, have offered each government a path to evade
responsibility for the evisceration of Kashmiri villages and families.

India and Pakistan each claims sovereignty in Kashmir, but neither has
found a way to control the land or its people. These failures are
rooted in what was perhaps Great Britain’s greatest imperial crime,
the partition of its Indian domain, which ignited violence that
claimed about a million lives. In 1947, the British government,
bankrupted by the Second World War, hastily completed a plan to divide
the subcontinent into the newly independent nations of India and
Pakistan. The status of a few territories proved difficult to
adjudicate. One was the former princely state of Jammu and Kashmir,
ruled by a Hindu maharaja and largely inhabited by poor Muslim
peasants. Under Britain’s demographic formula, territories with Muslim
majorities were supposed to go to Pakistan, but the maharaja signed an
accession agreement to join India. A year later, Pakistan tried to
wrest away the territory by sending in a tribal guerrilla force, a
gambit that ended in a military stalemate. In a sense, the war of
guerrilla infiltration that Pakistan initiated in 1948 has never
ended.

In 1972, after their third formal war, India and Pakistan established
the Line of Control and deployed artillery and infantry along its
length. On the Indian side lay most of Kashmir, as well as the
Hindu-majority region of Jammu and the Buddhist-influenced region of
Ladakh. On the Pakistani side lay a sliver of land now known as Azad
Kashmir and a Himalayan region of Muslim tribes known as the Northern
Areas. For almost two decades, a relative calm prevailed, but in late
1989--inspired by the fall of the Berlin Wall-- Kashmiris on the
Indian side, who were fed up with rigged elections and job
discrimination, staged a mass revolt. The I.S.I., which had used
Islamist militias during the anti-Soviet campaigns in Afghanistan,
reacted opportunistically, by arming those Islamist factions of the
rebellion which sought to join Kashmir to Pakistan.

Initially, when Kashmiri Muslim boys from villages such as Chahal
sneaked across the Line of Control for weapons and training, I.S.I.
officers encouraged them to join a local Islamist guerrilla group
known as the Hezbul- Mujahideen, which was affiliated with the
international networks of the Muslim Brotherhood. During the late
nineties, however, Pakistan shifted much of its support to
Lashkar-e-Taiba, which adhered to the Salafi strain of Islamist
thought prevalent in Saudi Arabia, and later to a jihadi group called
Jaish-e- Mohammed, or the Army of Mohammed. The membership of these
secondwave groups came not from Kashmir itself but from the Punjab,
Pakistan’s most populous province, where the suffering of
fellow-Muslims in Kashmir is routinely exploited by religious and
nationalistic political parties. Lashkar’s volunteers collaborated
with Hezb-ul- Mujahideen cells, but they weren’t fighting and dying in
Kashmir because their families had ties to the disputed land; they
were there because they believed that God had called them to liberate
the region’s Muslims from Hindu control.

At least fifty thousand people have died in Kashmir’s violence since
1989. The pace of the killing has declined in recent years, but
bombings and assassinations persist. Last August, on the highway just
above Chahal, Indian paramilitaries shot and killed at least fifteen
unarmed protesters marching toward the Line of Control; the shooting
touched off yet more street protests. In the satellite- television
age, the suffering of Kashmiri civilians has not been broadcast as
often or as vividly as that of Palestinians or Lebanese, but on Al
Jazeera and on Web sites from Britain to Bangladesh the war has been a
major point of grievance. The Indian government has long resisted
scrutiny of its human-rights record in Kashmir and deflects blame for
the violence onto Pakistan’s support for jihadi groups. Special laws
shield Indian security forces from accountability for deaths in
custody, despite ample evidence that there have been many hundreds of
such cases. Even India’s urban liberal élite remains in denial about
its government’s record of torture and extrajudicial killing,
Meenakshi Ganguly, a senior researcher for Human Rights Watch, said.
“In the history books, Kashmir is going to be where justice completely
failed the promises of Indian democracy,” she said.

India’s campaign to defeat the jihadis has, in some ways, become
subtler and more effective. In 2002, the government held an election
in Kashmir, judged locally as fair, which lured fence-sitting
separatist Kashmiri politicians into greater coöperation with New
Delhi. Last winter, when I visited, India was concluding a second
successful regional election, in which Kashmiris turned out in record
numbers. One afternoon, on the eve of the final round of voting, I
visited the gated home of Mirwaiz Umer Farooq, one of Kashmir’s
best-known nonviolent separatist leaders. He had been placed under
house arrest, so we spoke by cell phone as I sat outside his driveway.
Farooq’s coalition, called the Hurriyat, had decided to boycott the
election, a tactic that now looked like a mistake, since so many
Kashmiris had chosen to participate. India has spent large sums on
jobs and infrastructure projects, gradually convincing many war-weary
civilians and politicians that they can regard regional elections not
as a source of sovereign legitimacy for India but as a means to
control their local affairs. “We are not in a position to address
people’s concerns about water, electricity, and jobs,” Farooq
admitted.

The back-channel negotiations have also helped to quell mainstream
Kashmiri separatism. At times secretly and at other times publicly,
Musharraf and Singh each began discussions with Hurriyat and other
local groups about the terms of an eventual settlement, drawing them
in. “Musharraf was someone who was willing to think out of the box,”
Farooq continued. “It is not an insoluble situation.”

As violence has declined, the government has closed the worst of its
detention centers. Yet its over-all progress has only clarified for
Indian strategists the ongoing failure to stop the I.S.I. from
infiltrating jihadi guerrillas across the Line of Control.

One morning after my visit to Chahal, I drove up a pine-tree-lined
hill above Srinagar’s Dal Lake, past a manicured golf course, to Raj
Bhavan, a whitewashed colonial-era estate. I had come to see N. N.
Vohra, a white-haired career civil ser vant who last summer was
appointed the governor of Jammu and Kashmir. Imperial histories and
biographies lined the bookshelves in Vohra’s office; an oil portrait
of Mohandas K. Gandhi hung on the wall beside his desk. The Governor
told me that “whatever Islamabad may say to the world, and
particularly to American leadership,” he did not feel that Pakistan
had fully dealt with the I.S.I. and its “vested interest in keeping
this Kashmir front alive.”

Vohra said that when he first arrived as governor he received daily
briefings from intelligence officers about interrogation reports,
electronic intercepts, and other evidence of I.S.I. activity along the
Line of Control. He asked for copies of the raw intercept recordings
so he could listen himself. What he heard, he said, was controllers
speaking to jihadi commanders inside Kashmir for “twentyfive, thirty
minutes” at a time. “And they are very specific, very specific—to go
for this target. . . . They said, ‘Task No. 1: Eliminate the most
senior leaders available.’ And they mentioned some--I won’t mention
the names. And then, ‘B, go for the larger rallies of the big
leaders-- throw grenades, shoot, bombs, I.E.D.s, whatever.’ . . . And
the kinds of rewards that are mentioned, rewards that will be
given--lifetime, if you bump off a Grade A leader. If you injure them,
you get three hundred thousand rupees.”

Vohra had doubts about the Pakistan very much hoping in the last four
years that they are now progressively seeing the great wisdom and the
enormous benefit of not spending all their resources on building up
their armies and their armed forces to deal with India-- and to
subvert and infiltrate,” he said. “There has been a thaw, obviously,
quite visibly. The levels of infiltration have gone down. But they
haven’t given up. And that’s the worrying part.”

A few days later, I arrived at Wagah, in the Punjab, the primary
official land border crossing between India and Pakistan. A winter fog
had reduced visibility to a few yards. Five dozen Tata trucks loaded
with potatoes and other goods idled in a line facing Pakistan. The
border compound has the look of a government park; rows of eucalyptus
trees drape manicured lawns. The Indian and Pakistani militaries
coöperate at the Wagah crossing. On most days, rival honor guards
march and drill on adjoining parade grounds; on Pakistan’s side,
grandstands have been erected so that spectators can enjoy the show,
which has grown into a kind of martial battle of the bands, in which
each side strives to excel in the performance categories of
goose-stepping and glaring. Only very tall soldiers need apply for
duty at Wagah; each country seeks to conjure the illusion that its
Army is a legion of giants.

After four cups of tea, several signatures in clothbound ledgers, and
some subtle talk of gratuities, two porters carried my bags on their
heads to a metal gate. A protocol officer waited inside Pakistan; I
had an appointment with Nawaz Sharif, the former Pakistani Prime
Minister, who lived nearby, on a family compound outside Lahore.
Squads of police guard the Sharif estate, a walled expanse of
orchards, wheat fields, and pens filled with deer and peacocks. In the
main house, the former Prime Minister greeted me in a grand reception
chamber flanked by two lifesize stuffed lions, and decorated with pink
sofas, matching pink Oriental carpets, and gold-plated antelope
figurines. He is a rotund, clean-shaven man who, remarkably, retains
the youthful look of a person unburdened by stress.

In 1999, less than a year after he authorized Pakistan’s nuclear test,
Sharif initiated a precursor to the back-channel talks. In February of
that year, Sharif invited India’s Prime Minister at the time, Atal
Behari Vajpayee, to attend a summit in Lahore. The two governments
signed a memorandum of understanding; they also commissioned secret,
exploratory talks by special emissaries. Sharif designated an aide,
Anwar Zahid, and Vajpayee named a journalist, R. K. Mishra. “It was
basically on Kashmir,” Sharif recalled. “In the early days, we were
not really having any consensus on anything. But the mere fact that
the back channel was established was a big development. It was doing
some serious work.”

At the time, Sharif shared power uneasily with Musharraf, whom he had
appointed as Chief of Army Staff. Musharraf “found the Lahore summit
galling,” as Strobe Talbott, who was then the United States’ Deputy
Secretary of State, put it in a memoir. In these years, Musharraf, “
like so many of his fellow officers . . . was a revanchist on the
issue of Kashmir.” Musharraf apparently decided to break up the peace
talks. He authorized a reckless incursion of Army personnel disguised
as guerrillas into a mountainous area of Kashmir known as Kargil. A
smallscale war erupted; at one point, the Clinton Administration
believed that Pakistan’s Army had taken steps to mobilize its nuclear
weapons. Musharraf has said that he briefed Sharif on the Kargil
operation; Sharif denied this. “I think the back channel was making
good progress,” he told me. “But soon after, you see, it was sabotaged
by Mr. Musharraf-- a misadventure that was ill-advised, ill-executed,
poorly planned.” A few months afterward, Sharif tried to fire the
General; Musharraf seized power and threw Sharif in jail. After
President Clinton intervened, Sharif was released into exile in Saudi
Arabia.

India’s leaders initially mistrusted Musharraf because he was the
author of Kargil, but gradually, as Mansingh, then India’s Ambassador
to the United States, recalled, “We found he was a man we could talk
to.” After 2002, India’s economy began to grow more quickly and
steadily than at any time since independence; the ranks of its
middle-class consumers swelled; and it became possible for Indian
strategists to visualize their country rising to become a great power
by the mid-twenty-first century. Only a catastrophic war with
Pakistan--or Pakistan’s collapse into chaos--would stand in the way of
India’s greatness. “We were convinced these two countries must learn
to live in accord--must,” Jaswant Singh, who was then India’s foreign
minister, said.

In time, Musharraf ’s thinking about India and Kashmir seemed to
change, too. Late in 2003, splinter cells from Jaish-e-Mohammed twice
tried to assassinate him. “This is what turns him decisively,” Maleeha
Lodhi, then Pakistan’s high commissioner in London, recalled. Just
weeks afterward, Musharraf met Vajpayee in Islamabad and agreed to an
unprecedented joint statement: the Pakistani President would “not
permit any territory under Pakistan’s control to be used to support
terrorism in any manner.” The two leaders announced new formal
negotiations between their foreign ministries, which were known as the
Composite Dialogue. Privately, they re-started the back-channel talks
on Kashmir.

During the next two years, Musharraf delivered India proof of his
sincerity. Guerrilla infiltrations into Indian-held territory
declined; Pakistani artillery units stopped their salvos on Indian
posts, which had been used as cover for infiltrating jihadis. Indian
officials concluded that Musharraf--whether by an iron hand or by
building a consensus-- had persuaded his senior generals to accept the
potential benefits of peace negotiations.

At the landmark meetings he convened at Rawalpindi, Musharraf talked
about how a peace settlement might produce economic benefits that
could strengthen Pakistan--and its military. The Army had a
fifteen-year development plan; the generals knew that the plan would
be difficult to pay for without rapid growth. “I was very happy to see
how much focus there was on the economy among the Army’s officers,”
Khurshid Kasuri, the former Foreign Minister, recalled.

Mahmud Durrani, a retired major general who was then Musharraf ’s
Ambassador in Washington, said that this new attitude reflected a
broader change in outlook. Commanders were asking, he recalled, “Can
my economy support me? Can my foreign policy support me? What does the
world think of us?”

There was “the feeling that the world is changing and that we have to
change,” Khalid Mahmood, who was then Kasuri’s chief of staff,
recalled. “It was not easy. There were people who felt that the
President has made a U-turn.”

To refine the non-paper, Musharraf relied intuitively on his college
friend Tariq Aziz, a civil servant who had made his career in
Pakistan’s federal tax department, a bridge enthusiast who seems to
some of his colleagues to live precariously on tobacco and adrenaline.
Aziz’s Indian counterparts--J. N. Dixit, Singh’s national-security
adviser, followed by Satinder Lambah--worked more formally. The
Indians typically brought note-takers to the secret hotel sessions
overseas, whereas Aziz travelled alone, rarely carried a briefcase,
and often had to scribble his notes on hotel stationery. Altogether,
there were about two dozen of these hotel sessions between 2004 and
early 2007, according to people familiar with them.

The envoys worked on a number of long-standing territorial disputes,
including the problem of Siachen, a heavily militarized glacier where
Indian and Pakistani soldiers skirmish at heights above twenty
thousand feet, battering each other’s snowbound positions with
artillery shells. But a Kashmir settlement would be the grand prize.

To outsiders, it has long seemed obvious that the Line of Control
should be declared the international border between India and
Pakistan--it’s been in place for almost forty years, and each country
has built its own institutions behind it. Musharraf, however, made it
clear from the start that this would be unacceptable; India was
equally firm that it would never renegotiate its borders or the Line
of Control. The way out of this impasse, Singh has said, was to “make
borders irrelevant,” by allowing for the free movement of people and
goods within an autonomous Kashmir region. For Pakistan, this formula
might work if it included provisions for the protection--and potential
enrichment, through free trade--of the people of Kashmir, in whose
name Pakistan had carried on the conflict.

The most recent version of the nonpaper, drafted in early 2007, laid
out several principles for a settlement, according to people who have
seen the draft or have participated in the discussions about it.
Kashmiris would be given special rights to move and trade freely on
both sides of the Line of Control. Each of the former princely state’s
distinct regions would receive a measure of autonomy-- details would
be negotiated later. Providing that violence declined, each side would
gradually withdraw its troops from the region. At some point, the Line
of Control might be acknowledged by both governments as an
international border. It is not clear how firm a commitment on a final
border the negotiators were prepared to make, or how long it would all
take; one person involved suggested a time line of about ten to
fifteen years.

One of the most difficult issues involved a plan to establish a joint
body, made up of local Kashmiri leaders, Indians, and Pakistanis, to
oversee issues that affected populations on both sides of the Line of
Control, such as water rights. Pakistan sought something close to
shared governance, with the Kashmiris taking a leading role; India,
fearing a loss of sovereignty, wanted much less power-sharing. The
envoys wrestled intensively over what language to use to describe the
scope of this new body; the last draft termed it a “joint mechanism.”

Manmohan Singh’s government feared that successor Pakistani regimes
would repudiate any Kashmir bargain forged by Musharraf, who had,
after all, come to power in a coup. The Indians were not sure that a
provisional peace deal could be protected “from the men of
violence--on both sides,” the senior Indian official who was involved
recalled. And they wondered whether the Pakistan Army had really
embraced the nonpaper framework or merely saw the talks as a ploy to
buy time and win favor in Washington while continuing to support the
jihadis. “I remember asking Tariq Aziz, ‘Is the Army on board? Right
now?’ ” the senior official recalled. “As long as Musharraf was the
chief, had the uniform, I think he had a valid answer. He said, ‘Yes,
the chief is doing this.’ ”

As the peace talks stalled and Musharraf’s power waned during the
first half of 2008, the I.S.I., or sections of it, appeared to be
reënlisting jihadi groups. On July 7th, a suicide bomber rammed a car
loaded with explosives into the gates of India’s Embassy in Kabul,
killing fifty-four people, including the Indian defense attaché. The
United States intercepted communications between active I.S.I.
personnel and the Taliban-aligned network of Jalaluddin Haqqani, which
is believed by U.S. military and intelligence officials to have
carried out the Kabul Embassy attack. Haqqani has a long history of
collaboration and contact with the I.S.I.; he was also a paid client
of the Central Intelligence Agency during the late nineteen-eighties.
On September 4th, less than three weeks after Musharraf ’s resignation
as Pakistan’s President, Kashmiri militant groups, including
Lashkar-e-Taiba, appeared at a large open rally in Muzaffarabad, the
capital of Pakistan-held Kashmir; the Pakistan Army has a heavy
presence in this city, and it is unlikely that such an event could
have taken place without the I.S.I.’s sanction. The rally seemed
designed to send a message across the Line of Control: Musharraf is
gone, but the Kashmir war is alive.

“We asked them specifically, ‘How is all this going on if you say the
Army’s on board?’ ” the senior Indian official recalled. “They kept
saying, ‘Give us a chance. We need time. Yes, yes, the Army’s on
board.’ ”

In October, Durrani, who was then Pakistan’s national-security
adviser, travelled to New Delhi and met with members of India’s
National Security Advisory Board. Indian Army officers presented “some
very nice colored charts,” as Durrani put it, documenting recent
increases in ceasefire violations and jihadi infiltrations along the
Line of Control. Durrani found the charts “a bit one-sided,” but when
he returned to Islamabad he sought explanations about the violations
from Pakistan Army commanders. In January, Durrani was fired after
making public statements that were seen in Pakistan as too accommo-
dating of India.

The apparent revival of the I.S.I.’s covert operations influenced the
Singh government’s assessment of who was likely responsible for the
Mumbai attack. “It appears there has been a change in policy,” V. P.
Malik, a former Indian Chief of Army Staff, who now heads an
influential security-studies institute in New Delhi, said. “They
really have not taken action against these outfits, their leaders and
their infrastructure.”

Pakistan’s new civilian President, Asif Zardari, had entered into his
own struggle with those in the Pakistani security services who favor
the jihadis and covert war against India. Zardari’s Pakistan Peoples
Party has fought the Army for power since the late nineteen-seventies;
neither institution fully trusts the other, although they have
sometimes collaborated. (Some P.P.P. officials believe that the I.S.I.
may have been involved in Benazir Bhutto’s murder.) Last May, Zardari
tried to assert civilian control over the I.S.I. by placing it under
the authority of the Interior Ministry; the Army rejected this order,
and Zardari backed down. In November, speaking extemporaneously by
video at a conference in New Delhi, Zardari declared that Pakistan
might be willing to follow a policy of “no first use” of its nuclear
weapons, a remarkable departure from past Pakistan Army doctrine.
Privately, in discussions with Indian officials, Zardari affirmed his
interest in picking up the back-channel negotiations. Some Indian
officials and analysts interpreted Mumbai as a kind of warning from
the I.S.I. to Zardari—“Zardari’s Kargil,” as some Indians put it,
meaning that it was a deliberate effort by the Pakistan Army to
disrupt Zardari’s peace overtures. Several Pakistani and American
officials told me that Zardari is now deeply worried about his
personal security.

The regional headquarters of Jamaatud- Dawa--the educational and
charitable organization that, depending on how you see it, is either
the parent of or a front for Lashkar-e-Taiba--lies on a flat stretch
of agricultural land west of Lahore, outside a village called Muridke.
Barbed-wire fences surround a campus of about seventy-five acres,
which contains an Olympic-size swimming pool, horse stables, offices,
several schools, dormitories, and a large whitewashed mosque. When I
visited, a smoky haze had shrouded the facility in a yellowish murk.
The chief administrator, Mohammed Abbas, who is also known as Abu
Ehsaan, greeted me. Abbas, who is thirty-five years old, has a
substantial belly and a four-inch black beard. He showed me inside, to
a carpeted room, where we sat cross-legged on the floor, propped
against cushions.

The United States listed Jamaat-ud- Dawa--the name roughly translates
as the Society of the Call to Islam--as a foreign terrorist
organization in 2006, on the ground that it was an alias for Lashkar.
After the Mumbai attack, the United Nations Security Council followed
suit, with tacit support from Pakistan’s civilian government. Abbas
told me that these judgments were mistaken, and that Jamaat-ud-Dawa
“is solely a relief organization.”

He explained that young men often joined the organization as relief
workers, and were sent out for a year or more to areas that had been
struck by earthquakes or other disasters. These volunteers might also
reside at Muridke, where they can receive lodging, food, and pocket
money, he said. If they later marry or move into administration, they
might qualify for a modest salary. Among the group’s projects, he
said, “We’ve set up an emergency cell for accidents on the G.T.
Road”--the principal highway that traverses Pakistan. “People call us
and we send the ambulance to the scene. We also work in collaboration
with the local district administration. They’re happy with our work.
They think we’re honest--they know that if we pick up victims they
will get back all of their valuables when they are released from the
hospital.”

As we spoke, several full-bearded men spread a plastic mat atop the
carpeting and laid out a meal of chicken biryani and naan. Abbas
excused himself briefly to answer his cell phone; its ring tone was
the sound of a frog croaking.

I asked Abbas if his organization had come under pressure from the
government of Pakistan since the Mumbai attack. “The police came the
night the organization was banned, but the schools and campus were
already closed because of vacations,” he said. “It is not clear yet
whether the schools will be able to reopen. The hospital is
functional, but people are afraid. The number of patients has declined
because people are afraid India may hit this Muridke complex.

“No doubt we are afraid,” he contin- ued. “Hundreds of workers have
been arrested and shifted to unknown places. Top leaders have been
placed under house arrest. . . . If they come and they want to arrest
me, I am ready. But what is the charge sheet? The U.S. should
tell--the U.N. should tell--what Jamaat-ud-Dawa has done.”

President Zardari announced that he would ban Jamaat, as required by
the U.N. resolution. The Pakistani government plans to close Jamaat’s
schools and to place provincial administrators at each of the
charity’s facilities to oversee finances and personnel. However,
Pakistan has a long record of implementing such crackdowns only
partially, and of releasing jihadi leaders after relatively short
periods--an approach to counterterrorism that is referred to in India
as “catch and release.” Pakistan banned Lashkar in 2002, for example,
but its leader, Saeed, continued to preach openly. Indian officials
point out that Jamaat’s Web site continued to operate long after
Pakistan had declared the latest ban, and they claim that Lashkar and
Jamaat have now reorganized themselves under various new names.

Abbas took me on a walk around the campus. We chatted with a few young
men who said that they were students at Jamaat’s university. Lashkar
educates thousands annually in a Wahhabiinfluenced strain of Islam
that, in addition to its political doctrine of transnational jihad,
emphasizes austere personal devotion. (Pakistan’s traditional
religious culture has been influenced by the veneration of earthly
Sufi saints.) Evangelizing students form the core of Lashkar’s
membership and its strength—like Hezbollah, the young men in Jamaat
dormitories and “humanitarian” camps can offer social services and a
vision of ethical governance in a country that enjoys a paucity of
both.

Down a dirt road shaded by eucalyptus trees, we found Jamaat’s
hospital, where half a dozen villagers squatted on the pavement,
waiting for appointments. Inside we toured a gynecological clinic and
a dentist’s office--the fee schedule posted on the wall indicated that
a full dental exam would cost about fifty cents.

A blue police truck had parked in front of the headquarters building
by the time we returned. “This happened all of a sudden,” Abbas said
unhappily. Had my presence been detected, and the police been
dispatched to make a show of their vigilance, or was this a genuine
inspection? We shook hands and said our farewells beside the police
vehicle. On its side, stencilled in English in white block letters,
were the words “Crime Forensic Laboratory.”

A few minutes later, on the G.T. Road, headed back to Lahore, I passed
some Urdu-language graffiti painted prominently in white on a brick
wall. “Under the banner of preaching and jihad,” the scrawl declared,
“Lashkar’s caravan will roll on.”

Last December, during an appearance on “Meet the Press,” Barack Obama
remarked, “We can’t continue to look at Afghanistan in isolation. We
have to see it as part of a regional problem that includes Pakistan,
includes India, includes Kashmir, includes Iran.” The President has
appointed the veteran diplomat Richard Holbrooke as a special
representative for Pakistan and Afghanistan. The public description of
Holbrooke’s responsibilities has been carefully worded to avoid
explicit mention of Kashmir, because India’s government has long
rejected outside mediation of that conflict, but, given his mission,
Holbrooke will inevitably be drawn into quiet talks about the
achievements and frustrations of the back channel.

The Indo-Pakistani equation is critical, in any event, to the outcome
of the war in Afghanistan, which Obama has identified as one of his
highest foreignpolicy priorities. Stability in Afghanistan will be
difficult to achieve unless Paki- stan coöperates more wholeheartedly
in American-led efforts to pacify the Taliban. The I.S.I. built up the
Taliban as a national Afghan movement during the nineteen-nineties,
partly as a means to prevent India from gaining influence in
Afghanistan. Pakistan’s generals are unlikely to dismantle the Taliban
leadership if they continue to regard jihadi groups as a necessary
instrument in an existential struggle with India. “As far as the
Pakistan Army is concerned, they think India is trying to weaken
Pakistan,” Muhammad Nasir Akhtar, a retired three-star general, said.
“They also think America is working with India to denuclearize
Pakistan.” This mind-set, he added, “is very dangerous for the
future.”

The Mumbai attack took place during the transition between the Bush
and Obama Administrations, and the United States concentrated its
diplomatic efforts on preventing any armed conflict between India and
Pakistan. There were several close calls. Less than seventy-two hours
after the attack began, someone pretending to be India’s foreign
minister telephoned Zardari and threatened war; only when former
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice intervened did it become apparent
that the call was a hoax. The caller has not been identified; like the
Mumbai strike itself, the phony threat may have been a deliberate
provocation by jihadi-aligned conspirators.

The danger of open war between India and Pakistan has not passed. As
recently as December 26th, Pakistani intelligence officials concluded
that Indian warplanes were being positioned for an air raid. The
country’s national-security adviser at the time, Durrani, telephoned
American officials in alarm. The next day, Stephen Hadley, then the
national-security adviser, tracked down Durrani on his cell phone
while he was shopping in an Islamabad supermarket and told him that
there would be no raid.

During the Bush Administration, American and British officials
monitored the secret negotiations. British officials contributed a few
ideas based on their experience with the Good Friday agreement in
Northern Ireland, but neither they nor the Americans became directly
involved. Ultimately, any peace settlement between India and Pakistan
would have to attract support in both countries’ parliaments; if it
were seen as a product of American or British meddling, its prospects
would be dim. “One of the best pieces of advice we gave the State
Department when I was in Delhi-- and I remember writing about four
cables on this subject--was to keep hands off,” Ashley Tellis, a
former political adviser in the U.S. Embassy in New Delhi, recalled.
“We stayed away, and unless the Obama-ites choose to change this I
doubt we will intervene. They’ve managed quite well without
us--they’ve ended up in a place we’d like to see them end up.” Direct
negotiations, without mediators, had forced the two sides to confront
the hard issues, the senior Indian official told me. “Ultimately, we
need to screw up our courage and do the deal, and anybody else getting
involved actually gives both of us a crutch,” the official said. “We
grandstand.”

On the fundamental problem of the Pakistan Army’s support for jihadi
groups, however, only the United States has the leverage, through its
militaryand economic-assistance packages, to insist upon changes.
Unless the Pakistan Army makes a true break with its jihadi
Clients--and comes to regard these groups as a greater threat than
India-- not even the most creative diplomats in the region are likely
to succeed. “The time to act--to control the Pakistan Army and get the
civilians together--is now,” Brajesh Mishra, a former Indian
national-security adviser, told me. “I have no doubt in my mind that
unless the Pakistan Army is forced to do something about the jihadis
it will lead to a military confrontation” with India, and perhaps very
soon, he said.

Since November, India has employed a diplomatic and media campaign to
induce the international community-- the United States, in
particular--to put greater pressure on the Pakistan Army to break its
ties with jihadi groups. India and the United States have grown closer
in recent years, but Indian officials still see the U.S. as far too
willing to accept excuses from Pakistan’s generals. “The Pakistanis
have been able to play the Americans,” C. Uday Bhaskar, a retired
Indian Navy commodore, said. “I wouldn’t abandon them--that would only
make the problem worse. . . . The Pakistan Army will have to
self-correct. That is the only way-- short of total war.”

In the face of Indian complaints, American officials have sometimes
taken a protective posture toward the I.S.I. and the Pakistan Army.
Pakistan’s generals have become adept at pursuing both peace talks and
covert war simultaneously, and at telling American interlocutors what
they wish to hear. After September 11th, in particular, the Bush
Administration did little to challenge the dualities in Pakistan’s
policies. Bush’s counter-terrorism advisers decided that
Kashmir-focussed jihadi groups posed no direct threat to the U.S. The
Administration delivered close to ten billion dollars’ worth of
military aid to Pakistan, ostensibly to fight Al Qaeda, without real
oversight and without requiring that the I.S.I. break with regional
Islamist groups. “On Al Qaeda, there was nothing we asked them to do
that they wouldn’t do,” Bob Grenier, who was the C.I.A.’s station
chief in Islamabad during 2001 and 2002, recalled. As for groups such
as Lashkar, “There was a tremendous amount of ambivalence.” I.S.I.
leaders seemed “concerned about backlash” if they cracked down too
hard on the Kashmir groups, Grenier said.

Last fall, General David Petraeus, a specialist in counter-insurgency
doctrine, was promoted to head the United States Central Command,
which oversees American military operations and policies in the Middle
East, and in Afghanistan and Pakistan. (India falls under the Pacific
Command, thereby complicating efforts to coördinate U.S. military
liaisons in the region.) Petraeus has organized a group of about two
hundred government, academic, and military specialists to rethink U.S.
strategy in his area of responsibility. Their study has highlighted
the importance of changing the strategic outlook of Pakistani generals
toward India, according to military officers involved in the review.
Already, Petraeus has started to expound his “big idea” about U.S.
military strategy toward Pakistan: that the Pakistan Army must be
convinced that it faces no existential threat from India but does face
a revolutionary threat from jihadis within its borders--and so should
shift its emphasis from planning and equipping itself for war with
India to eliminating homegrown jihadis.

Admiral Mike Mullen became chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in
October, 2007, and since then he has held eight meetings with the
Pakistan Army chief, General Ashfaq Kayani, as well as three or four
meetings with General Ahmad Pasha, who was appointed by Kayani to lead
the I.S.I. last autumn. Kayani participated in the back-channel talks
while serving as Musharraf ’s I.S.I. chief; in that role, he endorsed
the principles in the non-paper. Both Pakistani commanders have
promised a new strategic direction. In January, Pasha told Der
Spiegel, “We are distancing ourselves from conflict with India, both
now and in general.” He added, “We may be crazy in Pakistan, but not
completely out of our minds. We know full well that terror is our
enemy, not India.” Mullen told me that he has heard the same from
Kayani and Pasha in private. Their shift in outlook “has been
transformational,” Mullen said. The Pakistan Army is “certainly
committed,” and yet, Mullen said, “It’s going to take a while, and
it’s an urgent, urgent situation, where lives are at stake.”

The Obama Administration has initiated a sixty-day review of policy
toward Pakistan and Afghanistan; as it completes that study, the
Administration will have to decide how much patience with the Pakistan
Army it can afford. The most difficult challenge will be finding the
right blend of encouragement and pressure to induce the Pakistan Army
and the I.S.I. to conclude that an overarching and long-lasting
regional peace is in their interest. Not all American officials
possess even Mullen’s qualified optimism. “History shows that the
Pakistanis will slow-roll us to death,” a senior U.S. intelligence
official told me, referring to Pakistan’s long record of tolerance for
jihadi groups. “The history is so compelling--that the Pakistanis play
around and nothing ever changes.”

Zardari and Singh may not find it easy to return to the non-paper
negotiations on Kashmir any time soon, even if they wish to. In
Pakistan, civilian political leaders might well reject the earlier
framework simply because the discredited Musharraf was behind it. Even
more daunting, the violent contest for power and legitimacy between
Taliban militants and Pakistan’s government is in many ways a struggle
over Pakistan’s national identity--and, particularly, over whether the
present government is righteously Islamic enough. In the midst of such
a contest, any agreement that made concessions to India would be
harder than ever to sell to the Pakistani public. “The military is
completely on board at the top levels--with a paradigm shift, to see
India as an opportunity, to change domestic attitudes,” a senior
Pakistani official told me. However, he continued, “The public mood is
out of synch.” The mood within sections of the Army and the I.S.I. may
be out of synch with peace negotiations as well; in early February,
the Kashmiri jihadi group Hezb-ul- Mujahideen hosted a public
conference in Muzaffarabad, which Lashkar supporters attended.

In India, Manmohan Singh seems determined to seek reëlection on a
peaceand- stability platform. Last year, before Mumbai, Singh took
steps to reconnect the back channel with Tariq Aziz, according to
people familiar with the diplomacy. Singh was concerned, in
particular, about whether Zardari would be willing to continue the
talks and whether Pakistan would stand by the non-paper, or insist on
renegotiating.

Pervez Musharraf arrived in the United States in January for a
speaking tour. It was not a particularly high-profile itinerary; he
spoke first to the World Affairs Council of Western Michigan, and
later at Stanford University and the World Affairs Council of
Philadelphia. On his last evening in the country, he attended a
reception hosted by the Middle East Institute, a public-policy group
with headquarters in an Edwardian row house near Dupont Circle, in
Washington, D.C. Two men with crewcuts and earpieces stood outside the
door; a private security guard with a metal detector checked the
guests. Several dozen people sipped red wine in a high-ceilinged room:
former American Ambassadors to Pakistan, lobbyists, and
representatives of some of the defense contractors who did big
business in the Musharraf era, such as Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, and
Northrop Grumman. The guest of honor turned up about five minutes
late, in a black S.U.V. with flashing emergency lights.

Musharraf looked well, in a tailored dark suit and red tie. He
circulated among the crowd and engaged in small talk about the
weather, inflected with nostalgia from his time in office--yes,
Michigan was very cold, but nothing like the time he stepped onto an
airport tarmac in Kazakhstan, when the temperature was minus
thirty-six degrees. I asked him about the almost-deal he had made on
Kashmir in 2007. I said that I had been surprised to discover how
close his negotiators had been to drawing to an end one of the great
territorial conflicts of the age.

“I’ve always believed in peace between India and Pakistan,” he
replied. “But it required boldness on both sides. . . . What I find
lacking sometimes is this boldness-- particularly on the Indian side.”
He then reviewed a long negotiating session he had had, many years
before, with former Indian Prime Minister Vajpayee, in which the pair
had tried and failed to agree on a particular joint statement. As he
recounted the incident, the pitch of Musharraf ’s voice rose slightly;
he seemed to be reliving his frustration.

He returned to the subject of the 2007 talks. “I wasn’t just giving
concessions-- I was taking from India as well,” he said, a touch
defensively. Then he calmed. He fixed his gaze and added, “It would
have benefitted both India and Pakistan.

Copyright 2009, The New Yorker