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Pakistan and India agree on talks

15 July 2010 22:53 (UTC +04:00)

Baku-APA. The Pakistani and Indian foreign ministers agreed on Thursday on more talks but little else as they failed to achieve any tangible measures to build the trust fractured by the Mumbai attacks, APA reports quoting news.yahoo.com website.
Pakistan’s Shah Mehmood Qureshi and India’s S.M. Krishna met for several hours in an effort to revive the peace process that was broken off after the 2008 assault on the Indian financial capital that killed 166 people.
"We have agreed that this process is valuable and we’ll continue to meet in future as well," Qureshi told reporters after their talks.
Krishna said the meeting had been "good and constructive."
"I think our dialogue has enabled us to develop a better understanding," he said, adding that he had invited Qureshi to visit India.
But neither minister set a date for future talks or announced any concrete measures that might soothe tensions. Both were grim-faced and somber at a news conference after the meeting, with little interaction between the two.
India has blamed Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) militants for the Mumbai attacks and Indian Home Secretary G.K. Pillai, in remarks published in an Indian newspaper on Wednesday, accused Pakistan’s main spy agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), of orchestrating the assault.
India has been pushing Pakistan to take action against the perpetrators of the attack as a pre-condition for relaunching the peace process between the two nuclear-armed rivals.
Krishna said Qureshi had assured him that his government would take into account in its investigation the information gleaned by Indian officials from a Pakistani-American, David Headley.
Headley pleaded guilty to working with LeT to plan the attacks and Pillai said evidence against the ISI emerged from his interrogation. U.S. authorities, who arrested Headley last October, allowed Indian investigators to question him for a week last month.
Krishna said the unraveling of the conspiracy behind the Mumbai assault would be the biggest confidence-building measure Pakistan could take.
SECURITY VERSUS KASHMIR
Security remains India’s top concern in talks with Pakistan after Mumbai. Pakistan wants discussions on other issues, including its core dispute with India over the Himalayan region of Kashmir, the cause of two of the three wars between the two countries since independence from Britain in 1947.
"We have to respect the Indian point of view and they have to understand the Pakistan point of view, and collectively we have to move on," Qureshi said.
While he and Krishna termed their talks useful, they appeared tense while speaking of their allegations against each other.
Krishna said Pakistan had not yet provided any evidence to back up its charge that India was fomenting trouble in Pakistan’s southwestern province of Baluchistan.
Qureshi denied Indian allegations that Pakistan was backing Muslim militants infiltrating into Indian-ruled Kashmir.
"Infiltration is not the policy of the government of Pakistan or any intelligence agency of Pakistan. Having said that, if there are individuals who cross over, deal with them firmly and Pakistan will cooperate," Qureshi said.
The meeting took place after India sent in the army to control weeks of violent anti-government protests in the part of Kashmir under its rule.
Both ministers agreed that the countries would continue talks, acknowledging the decades of distrust between them.
"We are politicians and politicians believe in dialogue. ... We will extract hope even from hopelessness because the spirit is to move on and to move forward," Qureshi said.