Pakistan's leading newspapers have lamented that the Indo-Pak foreign ministerial-level talks have produced nothing but a promise for more talks.
"Pakistan and India failed to agree on anything but that they would continue to talk," read the lead story in the nation's oldest daily Dawn on yesterday's talks between External Affairs Minister S M Krishna and his Pakistani counterpart Shah Mahmood Qureshi.
"The Pakistan-India trust-building dialogue ended in a deadlock as the two sides failed to come up with a clear roadmap for sustainable engagement or a consensus on confidence-building measures," read the report titled 'No common ground found'.
The News daily too lamented the "bad news" in a story headlined 'no progress reported' that the Qureshi-Krishna talks produced nothing more than "a promise of more talks".
"...(talks) collapsed, not for the sheer absence of the right momentum but because of India's inflexibility to agree to outlining a specific roadmap for future talks wherein Pakistan wanted the inclusion of the issues of Jammu and Kashmir and the Siachen Glacier, as had been the case in the erstwhile Composite Dialogue, a phrase now abandoned in favour of the more open-ended sounding sustained dialogue, sired by the Mumbai incident."
In its editorial The News described the talks as "small steps" taken in the right direction.
"There were no surprises and the two men sat next to one another speaking in measured tones they wanted nobody to misunderstand what they said. Yet what they said was very little and there was not much room for misunderstanding it.
"Reading between the lines there are a number of positives. The first was that they took longer in their discussions than was expected, a sign that they were at least prepared to sit around a table with an agenda that was clearly wide-ranging.
"Secondly, they are going to be doing it again and our foreign minister has accepted an invitation from his Indian counterpart to visit in the near future. Thirdly it is obvious that even though there may be a willingness to discuss more openly and frankly the issues which both divide as well as bind us together few of them are easily soluble."
"Words like 'useful' and positive' peppered the press conference throughout and the impression was given that we have moved on from 'talks about talks' to 'talks about what we do next'. To the man on the street this may seem like little more than a rearrangement of the chairs, but in diplomatic terms this is a significant shift in the currents that run between us. There is no quick fix, but at least the possibility of a fix for some things is on the table. Keep talking," the edit concluded.
