After a hiatus of four years, India and Pakistan are expected to hold expert level meetings on nuclear and conventional confidence building measures separately in Islamabad at the end of this month.
After a hiatus of four years, India and Pakistan are expected to hold expert level meetings on nuclear and conventional confidence building measures separately in Islamabad at the end of this month.The two-day dialogue will be held on December 26-27, 2011 at Islamabad with both sides led by an additional secretary rank officer of respective foreign ministries.Government sources said that even though it was decided at the meeting of external affairs minister SM Krishna and Pakistan foreign minister Hina Khar in Delhi last July 27 that the expert level dialogue would be held in September 2011, mutually convenient dates could not be found by the two sides till late December and that too after prodding from the highest levels.However, not much of a breakthrough is expected in these meetings as the two sides will recover ground post 26/11 Mumbai massacre. The last expert level nuclear CBM meeting took place on October 14, 2007.
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Sources said while Pakistan is expected to point to the threat posed by India's nuclear and conventional arsenal to Islamabad's security, New Delhi will stick to the line that its military posture is aimed to counter threats not only from South Asia but also China. Besides, the inter-theatre linkages between Pakistan and China via Pakistan-occupied-Kashmir mean that India has to be geared to the two front options.
Shishir Gupta is Executive Editor at Hindustan Times and one of India's top journalists covering national security, strategic affairs, foreign policy and geopolitics. Over the past three decades, he has extensively reported on India's military, diplomatic and security landscape, covering every major conflict and national security challenge, from the 1999 Kargil War and the 2020 East Ladakh standoff to Operation Sindoor in 2025. He has also covered major terror attacks, including the IC-814 hijacking, the 26/11 Mumbai attacks and the 2025 Pahalgam terror strike, along with numerous Pakistan-backed terrorist incidents in the Kashmir Valley and across India. He has reported on national and state elections for more than three decades. A recognised authority on strategic affairs, Gupta has covered India's nuclear programme since the Pokhran-II (Shakti series) tests in May 1998 and has written extensively on global nuclear issues, Indian diplomacy and the country's expanding global outreach. He has also reported widely on international conflicts and terrorism, with a special focus on the Indian subcontinent. Gupta has interviewed Prime Minister Narendra Modi more than four times, including Modi's first interview with the print media after becoming Prime Minister in May 2014. His other interviews include three with the Dalai Lama, as well as conversations with Benjamin Netanyahu, Amit Shah, Yogi Adityanath, S. Jaishankar, Nirmala Sitharaman and Piyush Goyal. He is the author of Indian Mujahideen: The Enemy Within (Hachette, 2011) and Himalayan Face-off: Chinese Assertion and Indian Riposte (Hachette, 2014). He was awarded the Chevening-Wolfson Joint Scholarship at Wolfson College, University of Cambridge, UK, in 1998 and participated in the International Visitor Leadership Program (IVLP) of the US State Department in 2006. He received the Ben Gurion Prize from Israel in 2011 and the K. Subrahmanyam Prize for Strategic Studies in 2015 from the Manohar Parrikar Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses (MP-IDSA). Since 2024, he has hosted Point Blank, Hindustan Times' weekly YouTube show on global geopolitics.
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