India and Pakistan have agreed to hold historic peace talks to overcome enmity that kept them on war's edge for a half-century, but officials said yesterday that details were still being worked out and experience shows that the process will be menaced by pitfalls.
The peace initiative comes two years after the long-hostile neighbors went to the brink of a devastating war -- with nuclear weapons in play -- and will include all the topics, including the hot-button issue of the divided Himalayan territory of Kashmir.
"I think the victory is for the world," Pakistan's President General Pervez Musharraf declared on Tuesday following his breakthrough with Indian Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee in tightly guarded meetings in the Pakistani capital under the cover of a major regional summit.
In a joint declaration read separately by the Indian and Pakistani foreign ministers, Musharraf pledged not to permit his country to be used as a haven for terrorism, and Vajpayee promised to seek a solution to the Kashmir dispute.
Gone were the usual Pakistani denials that it had supported Islamic militants fighting Indian rule in the disputed Himalayan territory, and gone were Indian demands that cross-border infiltration stop before a dialogue could begin.
But the agreement to launch the peace dialogue in February was already facing opposition from hardliners over such details, with Kashmiri militants who have long counted on Pakistani support branding it a sellout.
Syed Salahuddin, the chief of Hezb-ul Mujahedeen, the main militant group in Indian Kashmir, warned that military operations would continue until India frees jailed militants and proves its sincerity.
"There is always room for slippages," observed Najmuddin Shaikh, a former Pakistani foreign secretary. "Past history is testimony that things can go wrong easily."
Shaikh said that the new agreement had positive elements that permitted a higher level of optimism, such as consolidating confidence-building measures that the two sides undertook since April -- such as observing a cease-fire between their armies in Kashmir -- that enabled Musharraf and Vajpayee to meet and launch the new plan.
"No time limit is also important," Shaikh said. "This will be a process that will take time, that will be sustained and continued and enlarged upon."
Foreign Ministry spokesman Masoood Khan said that the level of diplomats who will carry out the initial round of the talks, and their venue, were still being worked out.
More than 65,000 people have died since 1989 in the conflict over Muslim-majority Kashmir, divided between India and Pakistan and claimed entirely by both. Islamic rebels are fighting for independence for the part of Kashmir controlled by predominantly Hindu India, or for its merger with mostly Muslim Pakistan.
Other attempts to end the India-Pakistan feud have ended in bitter disappointment and feelings of betrayal, most recently in talks in July 2001 between Vajpayee and Musharraf in the Indian city of Agra. An attack by Islamic militants on India's Parliament in December 2001 scuttled any hopes and brought the two nations to the brink of a fourth full-scale war.
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