India, Pakistan set for summit talks in Cuba

CUBA: The leaders of India and Pakistan will hold weekend talks in Cuba, hoping to ease tensions after a year of recriminations over terror attacks and Kashmir, Indian and Pakistani officials said.

Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf, who last met a year ago at the United Nations, will meet today. With both under political pressure at home, expectations are modest, the officials said.

The talks between the nuclear-armed neighbours on the fringes of a summit of Non-Aligned Movement nations in Havana, follow a summer of accusations and canceled meetings following the July 11 train bombings that killed 186 people in Mumbai.

Singh this week lamented "a problem of trust deficit between our two countries" and U.S. and Indian analysts predict few breakthroughs.

"Neither in India nor in Pakistan is there real pressure to achieve the kind of results that might be achievable or to make the kind of dramatic policy changes that would be needed," said Teresita Schaffer, a South Asia expert at Washington's Center for Strategic and International Studies.

The India-Pakistan peace process, launched in 2004 after the rivals came to the brink of a fourth war, will not revive "unless it gets a personal infusion of energy from the two leaders," the former U.S. diplomat said.

A key measure of progress would be whether the two leaders agree to revive formal diplomatic negotiations, which India called off after accusing the Pakistan-based militant group Lashkar-e-Taiba of carrying out the Mumbai attacks.

Indian officials said Singh would be looking for assurances from Musharraf to crack down on groups like Lashkar.

Musharraf also faces U.S. pressure to rein in Islamic militants on Pakistan's border with Afghanistan. Analysts said he would be hard-pressed to offer new concessions on the disputed border region of Kashmir, since India had failed to respond to his earlier initiatives.

"In Pakistan, the feeling is that Musharraf went out on a limb, and the Indians did not join him," said Marvin Weinbaum, a senior scholar at the Middle East Institute in Washington.

Pakistan want India to enter into serious negotiations about the long-term future of Kashmir. It believes "it is India's responsibility, since it has most of the cards, to play those cards," the retired intelligence official said.

Despite the modest expectations, Schaffer said the meeting could at least contain conflict in South Asia, where growing violence in Afghanistan, renewed warfare in Sri Lanka and tensions in Nepal have add to regional instability.

"The cease-fire, with rare exceptions, has held, and the leaders in both India and Pakistan want it to continue, or at least, they don't want it to die," Schaffer said.

Havana, Friday, Reuters