Top defence officials from India and Pakistan kicked off talks Monday over a disputed glacier high in the Himalayas where troops have clashed intermittently for decades.
The two-day meeting in New Delhi between Indian Defence Secretary Pradeep Kumar and his Pakistani counterpart Syed Ather Ali is part of the slow-moving peace process aimed at bringing lasting stability to South Asia.
India broke off all contact with Pakistan in the wake of the 2008 Mumbai attacks, which were staged by the Pakistan-based militant group Lashkar-e-Taiba according to Indian and Western intelligence.
An Indian defence ministry official said the two defence secretaries met behind closed doors, where they were to discuss the militarised 6,300-metre (20,800-foot) high Siachen glacier in Kashmir.
India in 1984 sent troops and occupied strategic areas on the glacier, raising fears of another full-blown war between the neighbours, and three years later the two militaries fought a fierce skirmish in the region.
The two armies clashed intermittently until a ceasefire in November 2003, but the fierce cold and harsh conditions are thought to have cost more lives than combat -- the temperature on the world's highest battlefield drops to minus 70 degrees Celsius (minus 94 degrees Fahrenheit) in winter.
A security analyst said the ongoing talks on Siachen, which is around 75 kilometres (47 miles) long and nearly five kilometres wide, may not bear fruit.
"Right now, our position is that 'you mark your ground positions on the map and give us an assurance that once we vacate (Indian posts) you will not occupy,'" retired major general Ashok Mehta said.
"Pakistan will of course not agree to that and so it will be zero outcome and we will meet once again," the Indian analyst said, referring to 11 previous unsuccessful meetings over the icy mass.
India wants "iron-clad" proof of existing Pakistani military positions to dissuade Pakistan from moving its soldiers forward in the event of troop withdrawals.
Relations between the estranged neighbours, who have fought three wars since independence from Britain in 1947, have improved over the last year after contacts between prime ministers and other senior government figures.
But India has recently sharpened its criticism of Pakistan and its alleged state funding of militant groups in the wake of the death of Osama bin Laden, who was killed by US troops in the garrison town of Abbottabad.
At the weekend, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said the leadership in Islamabad must "wake up" to the "terror machine", while Home Minister P. Chidambaram warned last week that Pakistan was becoming a "fragile" state.
India considers the Siachen glacier strategic because of its location between China and both the Pakistani- and Indian-controlled zones of divided Kashmir.