The statement issued in Islamabad on Tuesday at the end of the second round of Pakistan-India Foreign Ministers' review of the Composite Dialogue shows satisfactory progress towards normalisation, though those looking for dramatic developments on the core issue of Kashmir may have been disappointed.
Notable headway has been made on the difficult issue of Sir Creek, with the two sides agreeing to undertake a joint survey of the area and also to consider, for the first time ever, options for delimitation of maritime boundary between the two countries.
On the even more serious dispute over Siachin, although the two sides did not have a major breakthrough to announce, there are signs of advancement. They exchanged 'concrete' ideas for its resolution, and set a deadline for the next composite dialogue meeting in January 2006, to reach an understanding on the issue.
Notably, the two sides concede that the Siachin glacier needs to be demilitarised, but what they find difficult to agree on is a monitoring mechanism for surveillance. The 'concrete' ideas exchanged at the Islamabad meeting, hopefully, would prove helpful for the establishment of such a mechanism.
The foreign ministers also reviewed progress on some CBMs vis-à-vis people-to-people contacts, welcoming the recent agreement to operationalize the Lahore-Amritsar bus service in November and also the proposal to start the Amritsar-Nankana Sahib bus service soon.
In yet another sign of the dialogue's advancement, the two foreign ministers presided over a meeting of the Joint Economic Commission, first in 16 years' time deciding to restructure and streamline its work in the light of new developments. Technical level working groups from various fields, including agriculture, health care, science and technology, IT, environment and tourism are to meet in the near future to pave the way for the next meeting of the Commission.
Going by the repeated and firm statements of both President General Pervez Musharraf and Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz, CBMs such as the ones announced in Islamabad as part of the composite dialogue process are not an end in themselves but a means to achieve the end, which is the resolution of the core issue of conflict: the Kashmir problem. It is therefore not surprising that on Kashmir the joint statement makes some bland assertions, accommodating the concerns of both sides.
It seeks to placate India's concerns through the Foreign Ministers' reaffirmation of "their determination not to allow terrorism to impede the peace process." However, given the sensitivity of the issue it would be unreasonable to expect big announcements at every high-level meeting.
For, these can easily lead to unnecessary media controversies, damaging the peace process itself. The two sides, therefore, have to and must resort to quiet diplomacy.
Nonetheless, clues indicating forward movement on the Kashmir issue are present in the joint statement. It carries various Kashmir-specific CBMs, including a go-ahead for the setting up of meeting points for families living across the LoC, the start of Rawalakot-Poonch bus service, and early release of those who inadvertently cross the LoC. Interestingly, it also says that a technical level meeting would be held before December of the current year to discuss modalities for starting a truck service on Muzaffarabad-Srinagar bus route as early as possible.
Which, obviously, is to mark the beginning of trade activity across the LoC, and thereby indicates a strong resolve on both sides to build a durable peace between them. It is fair to assume that all these measures towards normalisation have been made possible by India's willingness to concede ground in the more contentious areas such as troop reduction and human rights violations in the occupied Valley. It would therefore be advisable to watch what happens on the ground in the days to come rather than what the joint statement says on the subject of Kashmir.