Washington: Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf has said the joint statement issued after his Sept 24 meeting with Prime Minister Manmohan Singh in New York has "broken new ground", but asserted that the two countries need to convert words into action in order to resolve all issues.

"I think we've broken new ground," Musharraf, who met his US counterpart George W Bush in Washington yesterday, said in an interview to 'The Washington Post', referring to the joint statement issued in New York.

"I see this very optimistically. But as I said, these are mere words. We need to convert them into action," he said.

Bush, after holding a 40-minute meeting with Musharraf at the White House, had also expressed the hope that a solution will be found to the "historically difficult" Kashmir problem between India and Pakistan.

Musharraf, sitting besides Bush, said the dialogue process with India was moving well and that he was "very optimistic of the future" on bilateral relations.

In the interview with the post, Musharraf pressed the White House to more aggressively press for resolution of the Middle East conflict, which he said is the key to defusing tensions in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere in the Islamic world.

"This (the Israeli-Palestinian conflict) is the source of all problems," he said, adding that Bush now appears "more focussed and serious" about ending the Middle East problem.