India and Pakistan made "considerable progress" on resolving the Kashmir issue between 2004 and 2007 and considered several options, including demilitarisation and granting autonomy to the area, Pakistan's former army chief said on Wednesday.
"The two sides showed flexibility as well as reciprocity in the back channel talks on the issue," former Pakistan army chief Gen Jehangir Karamat told PTI.
The back-channel diplomacy was encouraged by the previous regime of President Pervez Musharraf and the government headed by Manmohan Singh and this was what former Pakistan foreign minister Khursheed Mahmood Kasuri referred to, he said.
Though Musharraf and Kasuri have claimed in the past that the two countries were on the verge of a breakthrough in resolving Kashmir and other issues, this is for the first time that another personality in the establishment of that time has made such a claim.
Karamat was Pakistan's ambassador to the US between 2004 and 2006.
Karamat, a supporter of rapprochement between India and Pakistan who was not involved in these back-channel parleys, said, "The two sides considered several options and steps like demilitarising the area, easing the movement across Line of Control and granting autonomy
to the Kashmir Valley."