India and Pakistan "narrowly missed" a historic breakthrough in their three-year long secret negotiations on the vexed Kashmir issue based on "gradual demilitarisation" of the borders, according to a new publication.
The two countries had "come to semicolons" in their negotiations when the effort lost steam in 2007 due to the declining political fortunes of the then Pakistani president Pervez Musharraf.
These details have been documented in an account set for publication on Sunday written by New Yorker magazine investigative journalist Steve Coll.
The negotiations, which began in 2004, produced the outlines of an accord that would have allowed a gradual demilitarisation of Kashmir, a flash point in relations between the nuclear-armed rivals, the publication said.
"The effort stalled in 2007, and the prospects for a settlement were further undermined by deadly terrorist attacks on Mumbai in November," Washington Post reported quoting the publication.
Coll, a Pultizer prize winner, says under the plan, the Kashmir conflict would have been resolved through the creation of an autonomous region in which local residents could move freely and conduct trade on both sides of the territorial boundary.
Over time, the border would become irrelevant, and declining violence would allow a gradual withdrawal of tens of thousands of troops that now face one another across the region's mountain passes, Coll wrote in the publication.
The attempt ultimately failed, not because of substantive differences but because declining political fortunes left Pakistan's then-president, Pervez Musharraf, without the clout he needed to sell the agreement at home.
Although Musharraf fought for the deal -- as did Indian leader Manmohan Singh -- he became so weakened politically that he "couldn't sell himself," let alone a surprise peace deal with Pakistan's longtime rival, Coll says, quoting senior Pakistani and Indian officials.
Musharraf resigned as President in August, 2008 after pressure mounted on him to step down from the then newly-elected democratic government in Pakistan.
"The resolution of the Kashmir dispute was the cornerstone of a broad agreement that would have represented a paradigm shift in relations between India and Pakistan: a moving away from decades of hostility to acceptance and peaceful trade," Coll writes in the publication.
"It was huge -- I think it would have changed the basic nature of the problem," the article quoted a senior Indian official as saying. "You would have then had the freedom to remake Indo-Pakistani relations."
According to Coll's account, the secret negotiations consisted of about two dozen meetings in hotel rooms in various overseas locations.
