WASHINGTON, Oct 5: The overwhelming desire of the people of India and Pakistan for peace is nudging the two countries towards a peaceful solution to their disputes, observes the Christian Science Monitor.

The Monitor is one of several American newspapers and television channels that commented on Wednesday on the India-Pakistan peace talks held in Islamabad this week.

“Never before have had common people played such an active role in improving relations. In earlier times, only governments and intelligentsia were principal actors,” the Monitor quotes former finance minister and PPP stalwart Mubashir Hasan as saying.

CNN describes the decision to re-establish an India and Pakistan panel for economic cooperation as “another step in the peace process between the nuclear-armed rivals.”

International Herald Tribune says:. “Were the peace process between India and Pakistan a play in two acts, two days of bilateral talks held this week would mark something like the intermission,” the paper says.

The Monitor observes that while Indian and Pakistani troops are still arrayed against each other along the Siachen glacier, in the corridors of power in Delhi and Islamabad, “a steady thawing of relations has moved the nuclear rivals from the brink of war three years ago.”

The newspaper points out that a series of confidence-building measures since the peace process began 20 months ago has made South Asia a safer place. “Both sides have tried all alternatives — ranging from ignoring the other side (India), to the use of force (Pakistan), to the threat of the use of force (India again),” says Stephen Cohen, a South Asia expert at the Brookings Institution in Washington tells the paper. “Now both sides have run out of options other than to sit across the table and talk.”

Further explaining its description of the India-Pakistan talks as a two-act play, the Tribune says: “For the show to go on … the process must now shift from preventive measures to active, constructive initiatives, notably on the longstanding dispute over the control and sovereignty of Kashmir,” the Tribune says.

“To reach this goal … the two sides must graduate from merely avoiding a nuclear nightmare to fostering a new kind of relationship, one through which a tense frontier becomes a soft border that allows for the ‘free movement of ideas, people, goods and services,’ as Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has said.”

The Tribune notes that high-level talks in Islamabad on Monday and Tuesday have added to a steady trickle of confidence-building measures the two sides have achieved. But the newspaper feels that “the progress on feel-good initiatives is now pressuring diplomats to move into what might be termed Act Two: a durable accommodation on Kashmir.”