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.
