A former Pakistani leader’s death, and his wise peace plan that failed

When I sat down for a poolside dinner in Villanova in late September 2009, I didn’t expect to hear the inside story on how Pakistan and India had come tantalizingly close to making peace two years earlier.

But I was seated next to the guest of honor, former Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf, who had resigned under pressure in 2008. He was visiting with his longtime friend, Raza Bokhari, an immigrant from Pakistan to Pennsylvania who became a highly successful businessman and civic activist.

When Musharraf died in exile on Feb. 5 in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, I couldn’t help but remember what he had told me that evening in Villanova about the secret “back channel” talks that Indian and Pakistani envoys conducted from 2004 to 2007. Had the peace efforts succeeded, they might also have changed the course of the Afghanistan War by enabling Musharraf to crush internal Pakistani jihadis.

Instead, while dozens of guests chatted under torchlights, the former leader stared at his whisky glass and mourned. “We were so close,” he said. His tone of regret seemed genuine.

Yet, it was his own missteps — and the political tightrope act he tried and failed to manage — that brought him to Villanova and a subsequent U.S. speaking tour, rather than to a celebration for resolving an insoluble conflict. In the wake of his death, the peace plan he laid out that night still seems the wisest course of action for Pakistan to follow, if that troubled country can ever find another leader with the guts to take it on.

A secular general who appeared with his wife and enjoyed a good whiskey, Musharraf was a study in contradictions.

As Pakistan’s military chief, he was a hawk on Kashmir, the disputed, mountainous territory now divided between India and Pakistan, over which the two countries have fought three wars since their independence. For decades, Pakistan trained local jihadis to infiltrate the dividing line — known as the Line of Control, or LoC — and attack Indian soldiers.

In 1999, Musharraf instigated a disastrous border conflict in the district of Kargil, when Pakistani troops secretly infiltrated across the LoC high in the mountains, but had to withdraw after fierce Indian resistance and U.S. political intervention on India’s side. The Kargil War Museum, which I visited in 2018, still portrayed the conflict as if it were a victory.

Pakistan’s support for anti-Indian jihadis eventually boomeranged, as some of them began attacking their own country’s military. After 9/11, when the U.S. pressured Musharraf to help fight Al Qaeda and its Taliban supporters in Afghanistan, the so-called “Talibanization” of Pakistan increased. Having seized power in a 1999 coup, Musharraf finally recognized the danger and decided to change course.

“I thought we had to have peace for the sake of the entire region, and for India and Pakistan,” he told me in 2009. “We could reap a lot of economic advantages.” Musharraf sent his envoys to meet Indian counterparts in hotel rooms in Bangkok, Dubai, and London, trying to unravel the Kashmir Knot and two smaller territorial issues.

Musharraf explained that India had insisted it would never negotiate its current Kashmir border, including the LoC, and this had been unacceptable to Pakistan.

So he devised a compromise.

“I came out with a broad outline,” he detailed. This included gradually demilitarizing the Line of Control and Kashmiri cities, maximizing self-governance on both sides of the line for the Kashmiri people, and a joint governing mechanism for Kashmir, to include Pakistanis, Indians, and local Kashmiri leaders.

Most importantly, the LoC would be porous, allowing Kashmiris to cross, do business, and visit relatives they hadn’t seen for decades. “I wanted to make the Line of Control irrelevant, to open it in six to eight places and let trade flourish,” Musharraf said firmly.

That way, Pakistan could say the line was finished, and India could say it still existed. “The Line of Control would become almost irrelevant in 15 years,” he told me. It was a brilliant concept, although it attracted little U.S. media attention until a March 2009 article by South Asia expert Steve Coll in the New Yorker.

Many skeptics say the Pakistani army and the feared Inter-Services Intelligence agency would never have agreed to the plan, since fighting India was their raison d’être. Musharraf insisted they would have obeyed him. Other observers doubted the former president’s sincerity since during the last two years of his time in office, Pakistan harbored Osama bin Laden. Musharraf’s claim of ignorance is hard to believe.

We’ll never know what might have happened. In 2007, just when both sides were “close” to a deal (in Musharraf’s words), he fired the chief justice of the Supreme Court, causing a domestic furor that led to his August 2008 resignation. Jihadi groups linked with Kashmir resurfaced and conducted the November 2008 terrorist attacks in Mumbai. India nixed new peace talks until Pakistan cracked down convincingly on those jihadis.

And that is where things still stand.

But the Villanova story doesn’t end there. After four years in self-exile in Dubai and London, Musharraf insisted on returning home to contest elections in 2013. By his side was his friend Bokhari, who at the time told me by phone that Musharraf wanted “to see the political status quo broken.” Within weeks, however, the former president was put under house arrest and only allowed to leave for Dubai in 2016, where he lived until his death.

One can only mourn what might have been had Musharraf’s political misstep not derailed peace prospects. “Yes, it is one of my regrets,” he told me pensively, at that Villanova dinner long ago.