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Pakistan going to talks with an ‘open mind’

ISLAMABAD: Pakistan said on Thursday it was approaching the upcoming talks with India on the sidelines of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) summit in Egypt with a “positive attitude” and would make efforts to get the composite dialogue process going at the earliest.

Foreign Office spokesman Abdul Basit told a weekly media briefing that the planned meeting between the Foreign Secretaries at Sharm-al-Shaikh next week had “no agenda as such” and would be “open-ended.”

“We have no fixed ideas and we will be going to the meeting with an open mind. This will not be a structured dialogue because the composite [one], which was suspended following the Mumbai attacks, has yet to be resumed. We want to discuss this as well at the meeting and our effort will be that the dialogue process should be resumed as soon as possible,” the spokesman said.

Foreign Secretary Shiv Shankar Menon said recently that the purpose of the meeting with his Pakistan counterpart was to find out from him what action Pakistan had taken to prosecute and punish the perpetrators of the Mumbai attacks. The conclusions from this meeting will form the basis of talks between the two Prime Ministers at the same venue.

“We are going to the meeting with an open mind and a positive approach because we believe that only through this positive attitude we can resolve the problems that our two countries face,” he said.

In a reference to the Kashmir issue, the spokesman said Pakistan drew comfort from the Obama administration’s agreement with its view that “the problems in the region had to be resolved holistically and comprehensively.”

Asked to explain President Asif Ali Zardari’s statement that Pakistan had created and nurtured militant groups for “short-term tactical” objectives, the spokesman was circumspect.

“It has to be seen in the proper context. [The President] was referring to the time when the Western countries left Pakistan high and dry after the Soviet withdrawal” from Afghanistan, the spokesman said, adding the country was still facing the spillover effect of this.

“After 9/11, the country is facing new challenges, and in order to deal with them we need to transcend those narrow objectives and, as Pakistan has been saying, we need to have a holistic approach to resolve them.”

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