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India and Pakistan set joint fight on terrorism
By Amelia Gentleman
September 17, 2006: International Herald Tribune
NEW DELHI India and Pakistan have agreed to resume formal peace talks and pledged to work together to fight terrorism, ending a two-month cessation of dialogue triggered by tension over train bombings in July in Mumbai.
Meeting for the fourth time in two years over the weekend, Pakistan's president, Pervez Musharraf, and India's prime minister, Manmohan Singh, resolved to set up a joint agency to combat terrorism. The outcome of their hourlong meeting Saturday was unexpectedly positive, marking a modest warming in the temperamental relations between the two nations.
"It was agreed that the peace process must be maintained," Singh said, reading from a joint statement after his meeting with Musharraf at a meeting of leaders of countries of the Nonaligned Movement in Havana. "We instructed our foreign secretaries to resume the comprehensive dialogue as early as possible."
"The leaders decided to continue the joint search for mutually acceptable options for a peaceful, negotiated settlement on all issues between India and Pakistan, including Jammu and Kashmir," he said.
Talks were abruptly halted this summer after India blamed the Pakistan- based militant group Lashkar-e-Taiba for multiple attacks on trains in India's financial capital July 11, in which 186 people were killed. India accused Pakistan of failing to crack down on terrorist organizations within its borders, and public opinion within India hardened toward the government's policy of engagement with Islamabad.
Attempting to overcome this source of tension, Singh said he and Musharraf had "decided to put in place an India- Pakistan institutional mechanism to identify and implement counterterrorism initiatives and investigations."
The foreign secretaries of the two countries will meet soon in New Delhi to make arrangements for the peace talks to resume and these talks will focus, Singh said, on the future of disputed Kashmir, the Himalayan region over which three wars have been fought between the two countries since 1947.
India's incoming foreign secretary, Shivshankar Menon, who is to assume his duties next month, said that devising a joint approach to fighting terror had been critical to India's decision to resume talks.
"What we see is elements in Pakistan connected to terrorism in India," he said. "This is one way of dealing with it. We're working at eliminating the trust deficit."
Singh also said he had accepted an invitation to travel to Pakistan, at an as yet unspecified date.
The Hindu newspaper in New Delhi described the agreement as a "major breakthrough," but elsewhere the reaction was more muted, as analysts pointed out that while this was undeniably a step forward, it closely followed a step backward, and in sum represented no more than a return to the position of two months ago.
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