India and Pakistan have only ended a two-month hiatus in their fragile peace process by agreeing to resume talks, and a pact to fight terrorism together would be a challenge to implement, analysts said on Sunday.

Although a joint statement after talks between Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf in the Cuban capital of Havana on Saturday was full of good intentions, there was little new in it, they said.

Singh and Musharraf agreed that top diplomats of the South Asian neighbours would return to the negotiating table after India put off peace talks as investigators suspected a Pakistani hand in the July 11 bombings in Mumbai, which killed 186 people.

"Resumption of a dialogue is a positive development. We had gone backwards and now we have come back to where we were before the Mumbai bombings. This is not a step forward," said G. Parthasarathy, a former Indian envoy to Pakistan.

"In any case, we had to go back to the negotiating table. Our position was untenable especially because we had no evidence of Pakistani involvement in Mumbai," he said.

Singh and Musharraf met on the sidelines of a summit of Non-Aligned Movement nations in Havana.

The India-Pakistan peace process, launched in 2004 two years after the nuclear-armed nations came to the brink of their fourth war, has been marked by bouts of euphoria and disillusionment and undercut by domestic political pressures.

Progress on key concerns such as Kashmir and cross-border militant violence has been slow and the process has been hurt by separatist violence in Indian Kashmir and attacks elsewhere across India, blamed on Islamist groups based in Pakistan.

An Indian army spokesman said on Sunday that troops had shot dead eight Muslim militants in Kashmir over the weekend.

OLD WINE IN NEW BOTTLE?

While the latest pledge by Singh and Musharraf was a reaffirmation of their intention to push for peace, the devil would be in the implementation, analysts said.

"The decision reflects realisation on both sides that they have only one option and that is to talk. It is not a breakthrough but there is no other option," said Mutahir Ahmed, who teaches international relations at Karachi University.

The move to set up a joint agency to tackle terrorism was a step forward in trying to mitigate India's biggest concern in bilateral relations, said Indian Foreign Secretary-designate Shiv Shankar Menon.

"We have not done this before with Pakistan. It is new, we have got the mandate. It is to identify the kind of terrorism and organisations," the Press Trust of India quoted Menon as telling reporters in Havana after the talks.

But analysts said a similar arrangement was already in place in the form of a regular dialogue between interior secretaries of the two countries and it had achieved little.

Besides, it would be tough for India to remain engaged if there is another big militant attack.

"If there is another incident of terrorism then the (peace) process may again derail or if there is no progress towards problem-solving then Pakistan may lose passion," said Hasan Askari Rizvi, a Lahore-based international affairs analyst.

"Pakistan will continue discouraging militants. But if you think this phenomenon can be eliminated altogether, then it is not possible."

Substantial progress would depend on whether India is willing to make real concessions on resolving the Kashmir dispute and Pakistan's military establishment truly cracks down on jehadi groups, experts said.

"Nobody wants to throw cold water on what happened yesterday," said C. Uday Bhaskar of New Delhi's Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses.

"But there are some empirical realities and that is why we have to proceed with some degree of caution."

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