The utter pointlessness of talking to Pak civilian leaders

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http://www.firstpost.com/politics/the-utter-pointlessnes-of-talking-to-pak-civilian-leaders-17360.html

To “jaw-jaw” may be better than to “war-war”, as Churchill famously said. Yet, the current round of Defence Secretary-level talks between India and Pakistan strikes one as a particularly pointless charade at a particularly inappropriate moment.

The talks will centre around the avowed aim of demilitarising the Siachen Glacier, and it’s possible that over today and tomorrow, there will be a lot of informed chatter about the meaningless minutiae of the discussions — about “grid reference point of NJK-9842” and so on.

But for all the spin put on these talks, the unvarnished fact is that the very authority of Pakistan’s civilian leadership to negotiate anything that relates to the country’s military matters is today in grave doubt.

After the bitter harvest of May, when Pakistan’s duplicitous double-game in the war on terror was exposed several times over — from the US raid that killed Osama bin Laden to the ongoing terror trial in Chicago — its armed services and intelligence are cruisin’ for a bruisin’. Its intelligence chief openly rants about having Indian “targets” in his sights, and there is a considerable restiveness within the Army.

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1. Icy battlefield focus of India, Pakistan talks

http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/05/30/us-india-pakistan-idUSTRE74T2F720110530

(Reuters) - A military standoff on the world's highest battlefield is the focus of a fresh round of talks between India and Pakistan, and any progress on one of the least thorny issues may give a boost to a tortuous peace process between the nuclear-armed rivals.

Defense secretaries from both countries began two days of closed-door talks in New Delhi on Monday on withdrawing forces from the mountainous no-man's land above the Siachen glacier in disputed Himalayan territory , where they have faced off since 1984.

Both countries have long accepted the need to demilitarize Siachen, located as high as 20,000 feet above sea level, and military experts say the inhospitable climate and avalanche-prone terrain have claimed more lives than gunfire.

This consensus makes Siachen one of the least difficult issues being discussed in a long-running, stumbling peace process India suspended after deadly attacks in the Indian city of Mumbai in 2008 by Pakistani-based militants.