India and Pakistan held high-level peace talks today for the first time since the 2008 Mumbai attacks in an effort to rebuild confidence and reduce tensions between the nuclear-armed rivals.
The one-day talks in New Delhi between the two countries' foreign secretaries is seen as an important achievement that could help Pakistan concentrate its resources on supporting the US in its fight against the Taliban and al-Qaeda.
Few were expecting any breakthroughs on the divisive issues that have sparked three wars and countless skirmishes between the neighbors over the past six decades.
Indian home minister Palaniappan Chidambaram said he was "not very optimistic" about the talks.
The talks have no agenda and either side can bring up any issues it wants to, "but we are not going to enter into substantive talks on every issue," he told the NDTV news channel.
Indian foreign secretary Nirupama Rao and Pakistani foreign secretary Salman Bashir smiled briefly for the television cameras before disappearing into their closed-door meeting.
"We look forward to a very good constructive engagement," Mr Bashir said.
India, which has described the meeting as "talks about talks," plans to ask Pakistan to give it access to the architects of the Mumbai attacks and will push it to arrest militants and dismantle their networks, Chidambaram said.
Pakistan has said it will call for the resumption of comprehensive peace negotiations to deal with everything from the dispute over the Kashmir region to disagreements over shared water resources. India refuses to reopen those talks until Pakistan wages a militant crackdown.
"Nothing may come out of these talks. But at least we have to make the effort to talk to them and bring into focus issues that need to be addressed with a sense of urgency," Mr Chidambaram said.
The United States, which is intent on eliminating all distractions from Pakistan's fight against militants along its frontier with Afghanistan, has pushed the two sides to resume talks. The US hopes that a reduction in tensions would help Pakistan shift its focus from the Indian border to the offensive against Taliban militants in its northwest.
Washington was dismayed when both India and Pakistan mobilised their troops to their shared border in the aftermath of the Mumbai attack, in which 10 Pakistan-based gunmen terrorised India's financial capital in a 60-hour rampage that killed 166 people. India froze comprehensive talks after the attack.
AP