Journalist Steve Coll says that India and Pakistan held secret talks over the disputed region of Kashmir in 2006, but that tentative plans for peace have since been abandoned due in part to the political decline of Pakistan's former president Pervez Musharraf and the terrorist attacks in Mumbai.

In his March 2 article for The New Yorker, entitled "The Back Channel," Coll details the violence that still pervades the region and the effect the conflict could have on the U.S. war in Afghanistan.

Coll was the managing editor of The Washington Post from 1998 to 2005 and became a staff writer for The New Yorker in Sept. 2005. He won a Pulitzer Prize in 1990 for reporting about the Securities and Exchange Commission and again in 2004 for his book Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the C.I.A., Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001.

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