Pakistan says talks with India will go ahead on Feb. 25

Pakistan says talks with India will go ahead

ISLAMABAD — Senior officials from Pakistan and India will hold talks later this month, the first formal dialogue between the nuclear-armed rivals since the deadly Mumbai siege of 2008.

Pakistan’s government said its foreign secretary would meet his Indian counterpart in New Delhi on Feb. 25.

The meeting marks a significant thawing of relations between the two countries, which have long been marred by disputes over Kashmir and plummeted after the Mumbai attack, which India blamed on Pakistan-based militants.

The United States has been pressuring both sides to resume talks, hoping that reduced tensions between the two sides will help its strategy against militants in Afghanistan and in Pakistan’s tribal belt.

If tensions between Pakistan and India ease, it may enable Islamabad to shift some troops away from its border with India to fight against Taliban militants on the Afghan border.

New Delhi last week offered to resume high-level peace talks with Pakistan, and Islamabad confirmed for the first time Friday it would take the offer up.

A statement from Prime Minister Syed Yusuf Raza Gilani’s office said Pakistan would raise “all core issues” at the talks and urge India to resolve them quickly.

It was a further sign that Pakistan wants talks between the two nations to resume from where they were when India put them on hold after the Mumbai attacks. That dialogue covered a broad range of issues and had been intended to lead toward a full normalization of relations.

“We want a meaningful engagement,” Pakistani Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi later told Aaj News TV. “We want a result-oriented dialogue.”

Leaders of the two countries have met on the sidelines of international conferences since the attacks, but broad engagement with Pakistan remains a sensitive issue in New Delhi because of continuing suspicions that Islamabad has not done enough to rein in Muslim extremists operating in Pakistan.

Indian External Affairs Ministry spokesman Vishnu Prakash confirmed that Pakistan had accepted Delhi’s invitation to hold talks. India did not give details of the proposed talks, but has indicated that counterterrorism would be high on its agenda.

Kashmir, a Himalayan region split between India and Pakistan and claimed by both, is at the heart of decades of bitterness between the two countries.

They have fought two wars over control of Kashmir, and a dozen insurgent groups seeking either independence or a merger with Pakistan have been fighting Indian rule there since 1989.