The Lost India-Pakistan Accord

A peace agreement between India and Pakistan over the long-disputed Kashmir region would have been sealed if not for some petty politicking, a new report discloses. The agreement, in the works for three years, was ultimately killed "not because of substantive differences," investigative journalist Steve Coll notes, but "because declining political fortunes left Pakistan's then-president, Pervez Musharraf, without the clout he needed to sell the agreement at home." Coll adds that the broken agreement, which called for the creation of an autonomous region in which local residents could move freely, would have represented a "paradigm shift" in India-Pakistan relations that could have dramatically reduced tensions between the two states.