The Back Channel.

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'etre is not permanent enmity with India. Their raison d'etre 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.