AS the leaders of Pakistan and India get ready to fly to the US to attend the UN General Assembly, there has been speculation of a possible meeting on the Kashmir issue at the multilateral moot, with Washington playing the role of facilitator.

President Donald Trump’s recent comments that “a lot of progress” has been made in defusing tensions between the two South Asian states has strengthened this assumption.

The US president will be meeting both prime ministers — Imran Khan and Narendra Modi — and the possibility that Mr Trump will use the meetings to discuss India-held Kashmir cannot be ruled out.

However, considering India’s intransigence — with its stubborn insistence that the decades-old Kashmir issue is an ‘internal’ or ‘bilateral’ matter — as well as the American leader’s own mercurial nature, it is obvious that not too much hope should be pinned on any breakthroughs in the US over the next few days.