INDIA/PAKISTAN: The leaders of India and Pakistan have bolstered faltering peace talks by agreeing to increase cross- border transport links, boosting business ties and exploring mechanisms to reduce military presence on the 21,000ft Himalayan glacier claimed by the two nuclear rivals.
"We discussed all issues between our two countries, including the Jammu-Kashmir dispute," Pakistan's president, Gen Pervez Musharraf, said following a two-hour meeting with Indian prime minister Manmohan Singh in New Delhi. "I am very happy to say that we have made progress on all these issues."
Briefing reporters later, India's foreign secretary, Shyam Saran, the most senior bureaucrat in the foreign ministry, said both sides had agreed to revive a joint business council to boost economic links and had promised that Delhi would lift trade barriers to Pakistani goods.
Mr Saran said they had also agreed to open a second rail link by December between India's western Rajasthan state and Pakistan's southern Sindh province, to bring together families separated by partition in 1947.
The link will also speed up efforts to resolve a military stand- off on the Siachen glacier. The glacier is the world's highest battleground, where more soldiers die each year from frostbite and intense cold than from combat. Temperatures average -25 degrees, falling in the winter months to -50 and below, alongside a wind-chill factor of formidable intensity.
The two sides also decided to refer differences over the construction of a dam in the disputed northern state of Jammu and Kashmir which has been threatening the sluggish peace process to an independent arbiter.
Procedures to release swiftly those arrested after mistakenly crossing the border or fishermen who stray into each other's territorial waters will also be put in place.
Mr Singh and Gen Musharraf have also decided to increase the frequency of the bus linking the two parts of Kashmir divided between India and Pakistan, given the popularity of the service and the long waiting list of people eager to ride it.
The first bus journey across the line of control, the de facto border which splits the war-torn region of Kashmir between the neighbours, took place earlier this month.
"There is a willingness on both sides on making life easier for people living on both sides of the line of control," the foreign secretary said.
The approach from both sides was very positive and forward-looking, Mr Saran added.
There was little sign, however, of a significant breakthrough on the long-running Kashmir dispute over which the neighbours had fought two of their three wars since independence from Britain 58 years ago. The two also engaged in military combat in an 11-week border war in Indian-occupied Kashmir's mountainous Kargil region in 1999, in which 1,200 soldiers died.
Mr Saran said Mr Singh had reaffirmed to Gen Musharraf that India would not agree to redraw Kashmir's boundaries, a change Pakistan has desperately wanted for decades. Mr Singh also resisted setting a deadline to resolve the "complex" Kashmir dispute.
The talks came a day after Gen Musharraf arrived in India for his first visit after a stormy summit four years ago and near war between the two sides in 2002, saying he had come with a "message of peace".
Although the three-day visit was planned as an informal trip to watch the one-day cricket match between India and Pakistan - which India badly lost - it ended up being less about the game and more about moving the sluggish peace process forward.
Both sides exuded bonhomie, absent on earlier occasions, by exchanging esoteric gifts and lavishing hospitality on the other.
Ironically, the two leaders were born not in their own countries, but in each other's. Mr Singh was born in what became Pakistan and Gen Musharraf migrated as a child to the newly created Muslim state from Delhi.