NEW DELHI -- U.S. Special Forces began exercises on Monday with their Indian counterparts in a remote high-altitude region north of Kashmir, officials said.

The three-week maneuvers in India's Ladakh region, which has a long border with China, are part of new military ties which India and Washington have built since the September 11, 2001 attacks.

"These exercises are part of an ongoing process of interaction between the Indian army and the U.S.," said a colonel at army headquarters, adding that the two sides had engaged in similar exercises last year in the northern town of Agra.

Military analysts said the exercises in Ladakh, which is a part of the Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir, were designed to help the two armies share their experience and work together, Reuters reported.

"It's a give-and-take situation," said Bharat Verma, editor of the Indian Defense Review magazine.

"The Americans are interested in our counterinsurgency operations. We are interested in new techniques, equipment, technology, as we expand our special forces," he said.

"The thinking is, we must know each other if we want to work together sometime in the future," he said.

Washington has been urging New Delhi to send troops to Iraq, but India says there must be an explicit UN mandate before it can consider such a deployment. It has declined comment on Washington's plan for a new UN resolution on Iraq.

Defense ties between the two countries, which were on opposite sides during the Cold War, have warmed since sanctions imposed after India's 1998 nuclear tests were lifted following the attacks on New York and Washington two years ago.