Pakistan and India are talking again

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — Pakistan and India are talking again — or at least they’ve agreed to.

More than two years after peace talks were suddenly stopped in the wake of the terrorist attacks in Mumbai, the two neighbors and nuclear-armed rivals said they were ready to resume negotiations aimed at resolving a conflict that has been lingering for decades.

Both countries dedicate a disproportionate number of troops to guarding their common border, meaning there are little resources available for other conflicts. The United States has been pressuring Pakistan to concentrate its attention on insurgent havens along its border with Afghanistan, but the Pakistani military has been reluctant to shift its strategic focus while India continues to pose a threat to the east.

Peace talks, of course, are no guarantee of peace. While the news of the resumption of a dialogue between India and Pakistan has left many observers here cautiously optimistic, history suggests a positive outcome remains unlikely.

“We shouldn’t be too excited, quite frankly,” said Moeed Yusuf, South Asia adviser at the United States Institute of Peace, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank. “If something will be solved it will happen through the backchannels, and there is no communication through the backchannels at this point.”

After meeting during a South Asian summit in Bhutan last week, the foreign secretaries of both countries announced their intention to resume dialogue on all issues, including the disputed Kashmir region as well as on counterterrorism and security matters. Talks are scheduled to take place at the secretary level before Pakistan’s foreign minister visits his Indian counterpart in July. Who will make the trip to India remains to be determined as Pakistan dissolved its cabinet and Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi has yet to be included in any new cabinet.

The common history of India and Pakistan since the 1947 partition is a troubled one that has included three wars and a number of skirmishes. Just as the two countries repeatedly fought each other, they repeatedly tried to resolve their differences. The last — and arguably most promising — attempt at peace was started in 2004 under former President Pervez Musharraf, but success became more elusive as Musharraf’s influence at home waned and all dialogue stopped after Pakistani-based attackers killed at least 166 people in Mumbai in November 2008.

Since then, India has made counterterrorism the priority of its limited interactions with its neighbor, but Pakistan’s government has shown itself unable — and at times unwilling — to crack down on homegrown terror networks even though Pakistan itself suffers bombings on a weekly basis.

“An act of terror, whether in Mardan (city in Pakistan’s northwest) or Mumbai has disastrous economic effects and no one notes it more than foreign investors,” wrote Dawn, a Pakistani daily, in a recent editorial.

While India will not agree to talks that don’t include terrorism issues, Pakistan will only commit to a dialogue if it includes the fate of Kashmir. The disputed region has always been an emotional issue for Pakistan, which celebrates a Kashmir Solidarity Day holiday each February. Pervaiz Iqbal Cheema, an international relations expert and the dean of the faculty of contemporary studies at the National Defense University in Islamabad, said representatives of both Indian and Pakistani parts of Kashmir had to be included in the peace negotiations for them to be meaningful.

“The region cannot be normalized until the Kashmir issue is resolved,” Cheema said.

It is unclear why the two countries have decided to re-engage at this particular time, but Yusuf of the Institute of Peace said India has realized that the collapse of the negotiations in 2008 was a missed opportunity. Meanwhile Pakistan is now aware — in part through the WikiLeaks revelations of last year — of how increasingly isolated it has become in the international community.

There might also be on Pakistan’s part a realization that — as the United States has requested — it should intensify its fight against the raging insurgency on its western border, which would be easier if tension eases on the Indian front. Just last week a suicide bombing on an army recruitment center in Mardan claimed the lives of at least 27 soldiers in the latest attack on Pakistan’s security forces.

Even if both sides are serious about restarting peace negotiations, the process is likely to be slow. Yusuf said nobody should expect a solution within six months or a year. Others are not expecting any solution at all.

“Pakistan says: ‘Let there be resolution of disputes before normalization,’” the Express Tribune, a Karachi-based daily, wrote recently. “Since this process started a couple of decades ago, this approach has only worsened the state of disputes. Will it work this time? Most probably, it won’t.”