ISLAMABAD -- If India and Pakistan, South Asia's two nuclear-armed neighbors, were conscious of global concerns over the breakdown of the summit between their leaders at the historic city of Agra, they took little time before sending out identical messages.
A day after Gen. Pervez Musharraf, Pakistan's president, returned home after meeting with Indian Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee, without even a joint statement to show for his three-day visit to India, Pakistani Foreign Minister Abdul Sattar refused to describe the summit as a failure. His words were spoken just a few hours after a similar statement from Indian Minister for External Affairs Jaswant Singh, who was eager to point out that a peace dialogue launched with the summit would continue.
While Singh put across his hope with words such as "The caravan of peace will continue on its march and on some auspicious day it will reach its destination," Sattar said, "Considerable progress was made," adding that "The Agra summit was inconclusive but did not fail." Sattar also announced that Musharraf and Vajpayee would now meet in New York in September on the sidelines of the annual session of the U.N. General Assembly.