Pakistan Army Chief Gen. Ashraf Parvez Kayani met President Asif Ali Zardari and Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani on the afternoon of July 15, just hours before India and Pakistan resumed extended talks in the evening that soured badly, well informed sources said here. After two days of bitter slanging match, sources with access to
the government see the hand of the Pakistan Army, widely considered the real power centre in Islamabad, in the hardening of posture on Pakistan’s part at Thursday’s talks that ended in mutual recrimination without any roadmap for future engagement. Although the purpose of Gen. Kayani’s meeting was to brief the civilian leadership about his recent visit to Australia and the security situation in the country, the India-Pakistan foreign minister-level discussions figured prominently in the discussions, the sources said.
The meeting assumes significance as both sides in the morning struck an optimistic note about the talks between external affairs minister S.M. Krishna and his Pakistani counterpart Shah Mehmood Qureshi.
When it was decided to extend the discussions, it was widely seen as sign of some progress in the talks. In the preparatory talks of foreign secretaries and home ministers, the two sides had agreed on a set of confidence building measures (CBM) like the exchange of fishermen and prisoners, trade and people-to-people contacts across the Line of Control in Kashmir that will signal a gradual normalising of ties. There was a plan to announce these CBMs at the end of the talks, the sources said. But things started souring when the two sides sat down for discussions in the evening with Islamabad upping the ante on Kashmir and insisting on a resumption of full-scale composite dialogue against India’s incremental approach. The talks deadlocked after the Pakistani side asked for a time line to resolve what they called “doable issues”, including the territorial dispute over the Siachen glacier in the Himalayas and Sir Creek in Gujarat by November, the sources said. —IANS