Musharraf had agreed to shift stand on Kashmir

The army took the extraordinary steps that it did to enter into these negotiations over Kashmir,essentially threatening to reverse decades of policy in this negotiation with India,it was not coercion that brought them to the table; it was aspiration, he said in his testimony before the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom.

They wanted,Musharraf in particular,the international legitimacy,the credibility. He wanted to be celebrated at international events as a peacemaker. He wanted Oslo to pay attention to him, Coll said in response to a question. The only way to achieve stability in South Asia,he observed,is through normalisation between India and Pakistan. And thats why the Kashmir negotiations matter8230; as a pathway to normalisation, he argued.

Coll,currently president and CEO of the New America Foundation,had written an investigative article in The New York Times,saying that India and Pakistan held several rounds of secretive talks and were on the brink of achieving a breakthrough in Kashmir.