The dispute between India and Pakistan over Kashmir should be settled well within three years, Pakistan's president said in a newspaper interview on Thursday, as talks began to extend a ceasefire in the Himalayan region. President Pervez Musharraf told the Dawn newspaper he was not trying to impose a deadline, but he wanted a speedy end to nearly five decades of argument which has led to two wars between the South Asian nuclear rivals. "I have not asked them to give any timeframe," Musharraf told the Pakistani daily. Talks opened in New Delhi on Thursday to build on a ceasefire that has held since November on the Siachen Glacier in northern Kashmir. Asked whether the solution to Kashmir could be found in three years, Musharraf replied: "I don't know. It should be resolved much before three years." Musharraf described a statement by Indian Foreign Minister Natwar Singh that there was no hurry to settle the Kashmir issue as a comparative term. "But what I would like to say is that we should move as fast as possible. "If we don't, then we can't have confidence boosting measures," he said, adding that such measures needed to move in tandem with dialogue. In New Delhi on Wednesday, India and Pakistan agreed to boost ties between their people divided by decades of enmity but did not publicise details.
