ISLAMABAD, Jan 29: Senior Foreign Office officials and President of Azad Kashmir Maj-Gen (retd) Muhammad Anwar Khan will meet APHC leaders on Feb 9 to brief them about coming India-Pakistan talks to be held from Feb 16 to 18, official sources told Dawn on Thursday.

The next day the APHC leaders are expected to meet President General Pervez Musharraf. "Before the talks the government would take the Kashmiri leadership into confidence in a bid to remove its apprehensions on various issues and to assure our Kashmiri friends that the issue of Kashmir cannot be ignored and it has to be resolved," a source said.

However, APHC convener Muhammad Farooq Rehmani, when contacted, said it was yet not clear what would be the format of the talks between India and Pakistan. "We need to be informed about the format of these talks," he said.

"We are not expecting any breakthrough in these talks," Mr Rehmani said, adding that India initially wanted Pakistan to discuss softer issues. "We have been told that the two sides would hold further talks on Feb 30 to sort out technical issues regarding the proposed bus service between Muzaffarabad and Srinagar," Mr Rehmani said.

He said it was difficult to assess at this stage how these talks would progress between the two countries. These talks, he said, were being held because of the enormous interest being taken by the United States and other international players.

Another APHC leader Nazir Ahmad Shaal told Dawn that there were a lot of pitfalls in the process of negotiations and that the environment was still very hazy.

"The main question is whether the aspirations of the Kashmiris will be taken into considerations in these talks," he said. He called upon the government to make Kashmiris part of the proposed talks to remove their apprehensions. "Some people maintain that it is the political expediency that is forcing both the countries to hold talks under the influence of a global policeman," he added.

Mr Shaal said there was no timeframe for the composite dialogue and nobody was aware about the number of round of talks. "It is too early to predict anything. It is not even in the embryonic stage. Therefore, we really don't know what will happen in these talks," Mr Shaal said.

Nevertheless, he said, things would become clear when the Pakistan government took the Kashmiri leaders into confidence before the talks. He said the Kashmiri leaders had recently met British High Commissioner Mark Layal Grant and were assured by him that the international communitywas taking interest in getting the Kashmir dispute resolved.