ISLAMABAD – Pakistan is ready, as it appears to have agreed with India, to move forward with a new approach for an engagement with its neighbour to start a “full-spectrum” dialogue without giving this process a diplomatic nomenclature but carefully picking the thread from where it had been dropped after the Mumbai incident that jeopardised the peace process.
“Pakistan will approach (all issues) with an open and a constructive mind… it’s a work in progress but it’s resuming with a new spirit… we will not jettison the old good work and at the same time we will not be lost in archives,” Foreign Secretary Salman Bashir said while sharing with the Diplomatic Correspondents’ Association (DCA) the outcome of the meeting with his Indian counterpart.
The four-month process will start in March with a sequence of meetings including reviews at the secretary and ministerial levels to complete it by July within the time-frame agreed to between the foreign secretaries of the two countries on the sidelines of the SAARC ministerial committee’s meeting.
“We have broken the ice with a sense of realization that the deadlock was self-defeating … the talks were very constructive without acrimony… the issues are complex but we have ability to take responsibility and resolve them,” the foreign secretary said with a rare optimism and avoided calling it a composite dialogue process, emphasizing that this would be a “full-spectrum” dialogue.
However, the bottom-line in his guarded optimism was that this required “lot of patience, with requisite political will” as there were many sceptics with “our history already replete with hope and despair”. “But I am optimistic that this time the process will make a difference,” he anticipated. The secretary did not confine the beginning of the peace process by giving it a name and said “the worst thing that can happen to Pakistan and India is to superimpose conditions on the already complex issues”.
“He said the eight already identified issues would remain on the table with same format “but we are clear that the engagement should not confine to these eight issues as it should go beyond them”. He said now the most important issue was that of strategic stability. On Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal,he said: “Our policy is to keep minimum credible deterrence capability,” he reiterated. He said the Kashmir issue’s resolution was a must and both sides would have to deal with it along with other issues.
“There is a realisation (on both sides) that peace was imperative for the people of both countries and they should not continue to be mired in this situation,” he said, adding that it was time to paint for the people of South Asia a picture not of despondency but of hope.
On Kashmir, he said Pakistan wanted the resolution of this issue in accordance with UN resolutions and aspirations of the people of Kashmir. Asked whether the issue of terrorism would take precedence over the already defined issues, the secretary said the peace process should not be held hostage to any issue but “it is in our own interest to move against terrorism and deal with it directly as it is a much wider issue.”
