Indo-Pak talks setback seen as temporary

The two sides should pick up the pieces and iron out differences at a meeting of their foreign ministers next month, they said.

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf held talks late on Wednesday on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly, in a bid to push forward peace moves that began two years ago.

But after more than four hours of negotiations, the neighbours merely reaffirmed their desire to continue talks without setting any concrete objectives or announcing any new initiatives, as many had expected.

"The two sides seem to have returned to their mutual suspicions and there is a trust deficit again," said Chidanand Rajghatta, foreign editor of the Times of India.

"It has become a chicken-and-egg situation. Both sides want the other to address the problem first," he said from New York.

The meeting seemed doomed even before it started as the two sides had exchanged barbs and returned to stated positions over Kashmir, partly due to domestic political compulsions, analysts said.

While Singh told US President George W. Bush that Pakistan continued to control the flow of Islamic guerrillas into Kashmir, Musharraf retaliated by equating the Kashmir insurgency to the Palestine problem, a position New Delhi strongly rejects.

Indian officials said they could also not give in to Pakistan's insistence for troop reduction in Kashmir since militant violence and cross-border infiltration continued.