NEW YORK: President Obama s recent trip to Afghanistan highlighted the growing American and international perception that without better governance Afghanistan will fail. As President Obama apparently made clear in his late night meeting with President Hamid Karzai, no matter what other progress is made, America and its allies cannot succeed in Afghanistan unless the …

PALM BEACH GARDENS, Florida: In trying to save Israel and save Palestine, competing interest groups in Washington are saving no more than the conflict itself. The efforts of the Jewish, Arab and Muslim communities in America should be harnessed for the resolution of the Arab Israeli conflict. So far, the Jews advocate for Israel and …

NASIRIYA, Iraq: The March 7 elections in Iraq remain a topic of interest around the world as both former Prime Minister Iyad Allawi and current Prime Minister Nouri Al-Maliki scramble to create coalitions that would give them a 163-seat majority in parliament. As many feared, violence has marred post-election Iraq with deadly attacks on Iraqi …

LONDON: International climate talks in Bonn, Germany (April 9-11) tried to salvage December’s failed Copenhagen summit. Meanwhile, some rich countries are imposing their own carbon limitations anyway and threatening to curb imports from poor countries that are not. This will cripple their own economies and harm the poor without doing much about emissions. Various governments …

NEW YORK: The battle with the United States over China’s exchange rate continues. When the Great Recession began, many worried that protectionism would rear its ugly head. True, G-20 leaders promised that they had learned the lessons of the Great Depression. But 17 of the G-20’s members introduced protectionist measures just months after the first …

RAMALLAH/JERUSALEM: The latest rift between the United States and Israel, which began with the Israeli announcement of more construction planned for Ramat Shlomo – a Jewish-only neighborhood that would further separate East Jerusalem from the rest of a future Palestinian state – distracts from the larger, even more inhumane separation that must be reversed if …

KARACHI: To generations of young Pakistanis before the tragic events of 9/11 the British Council meant books: great books, pages and pages of both historical and contemporary literature that could be borrowed from or read at the many libraries that the council maintained in the country. To these generations the British Council was a literary …

WASHINGTON, DC: Perhaps never in history have nuclear security, non-proliferation, and arms control received the prominence that they will during this month’s strategic trifecta: the April 6 release of the latest United States Nuclear Posture Review (NPR), the April 8 signing in Prague of the New START Treaty, and the April 12-13 Nuclear Security Summit. …

BONN: Less than two weeks after the death of Mohamed Sayed Tantawi, the Grand Sheikh of Al-Azhar University, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak appointed Tantaw’s successor to the most senior post at the 1,000-year-old university, the oldest and most revered seat of learning for many Sunni Muslims. Ahmed Al-Tayeb, the former Grand Mufti of Egypt, has …

CAIRO: “April is the cruelest month. With those words, T.S. Eliot famously began “The Wasteland, a poem about universal despair and futility dubbed one of the most important in the 20th century. And for the few Egyptians who had decided to break the silence, even risk their lives in the struggle to restore their dignity …

FLORENCE: Richard Nixon has been dead for 15 years, but he is making another comeback in America. The 37th President of the United States believed that international monetary relations are unlikely to be transformed by talking. Instead, he thought that radical unilateral action was required. Today, pressure is increasing for the US Treasury to follow …

I have read very closely the article by Vaclav Havel, Mikhail Kasyanov and four others, under the title "Freedom arrested in Venezuela¨ (April 6, 2010, page 7) As the Ambassador of Venezuela in Cairo and from my view as a Venezuelan citizen, I can only regret the authors’ lack of information of the real situation …

I have read very closely the article by Vaclav Havel, Mikhail Kasyanov and four others, under the title “Freedom arrested in Venezuela¨ (April 6, 2010, page 7) As the Ambassador of Venezuela in Cairo and from my view as a Venezuelan citizen, I can only regret the authors’ lack of information of the real situation …

CAIRO: In a report published last month on violent crimes committed against women in 2009, Karam Saber Ibrahim, executive director of The Land Center for Human Rights, a Cairo-based non-governmental organization, spoke of a belief that some Egyptians continue to hold, that “women are fundamentally lacking…. They are not complete, because they are not men. …

PARIS: It is almost taken for granted nowadays that this is to be the “Asian Century, marking an irreversible political/economic shift in global power from West to East. China has replaced Germany as the world’s leading exporter, while South Korea’s Korean Electric recently outbid Electricité de France to build three nuclear reactors in Abu Dhabi. …

WASHINGTON, DC: Iraqis say Allah kareem (God is generous) as a way of expressing trust in the hands of fate to take care of them in an uncertain future. As the shape of Iraq’s new government slowly comes into focus after the second national elections since the fall of Saddam Hussein, there is reason for …

BRUSSELS: Two decades ago, Ethiopia was a Cold War battlefield. On the ideological map of the world, it was Soviet territory, a land of famine, dictatorship, and civil war. But, with the overthrow of Mengistu Haile Mariam’s Marxist-Leninist dictatorship in 1991, Ethiopia began to transform itself. Today, it ranks among the five fastest-growing economies in …

BERKELEY: In the United States, we sit in the midst of 10 percent unemployment. In some countries, fiscal policy is crippled by legitimate fears that more deficit spending will trigger government-debt crises. In many other countries, fiscal policy is crippled by confusion between short-term cyclical and long-term structural deficits. Meanwhile, banking policy is crippled by …

How to feed nine billion people by 2050 has been a big worry since food prices rose drastically in 2007-08. But any fight against hunger must deal with the one billion people who lack food right now. Calls for “new thinking and a lot more money appear in a report for a 1,000-delegate Global Conference …

BERLIN: The European Union’s recent summit has brought about a typically European compromise on the Greek financial crisis, one that avoids the term “solution and hides behind the idea of a “mechanism. Whether it works will be seen this month, when Greece will have to refinance its debt once more. German Chancellor Angela Merkel prevailed …

Since the Iraqi elections on March 7, a number of columnists have said that the war-ravaged country has been transformed into a beacon of democracy in the Middle East. Once it was realized that nearly 62 percent of eligible Iraqi voters had flocked to the polls with comparatively less violence threatening their lives, former Bush …

KARACHI: I watched the Bollywood film “My Name is Khan the other day. The brilliant depiction of an autistic person by India’s leading actor Shah Rukh Khan and director Karan Johar’s surprisingly taut direction made for a good film. In one particular scene, I felt a lump form in my throat. Sonya Jehan, the actress …

MANSEHRA: At 9:20 am on March 10, a routine office meeting was shattered by the sound of armed militants storming World Vision’s office in northwest Pakistan. The gunmen opened fire and detonated a bomb, destroying the office as they left. Six World Vision staff members, including two women, were killed. Eight more were injured, three …

BRUSSELS: This week in Prague, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev and US President Barack Obama will sign a new strategic arms reduction treaty (START). That agreement is a historic achievement, and an inspiration for further progress in global arms control. But at the same time, here and now, we must also prepare to defend against another, …

PRAGUE: The arrest of Oswaldo Álvarez Paz, a former president of Venezuela’s Chamber of Deputies, governor of the Venezuelan state of Zulia, and presidential candidate, should concern the entire world because it demonstrates just how far President Hugo Chávez’s regime is willing to stray from democratic norms. Standing silent as democracy atrophies in Venezuela is …

DAMASUC: Following five years of tense relations between the United States and Syria, the Barack Obama Administration has appointed a new ambassador to Damascus – the current Deputy Ambassador to Iraq, Robert Ford. The nomination shows the central importance of Iraq to US-Syria relations. The US war on Iraq drove a deep wedge between the …

SAO PAULO: As well-intentioned gestures go, Earth Hour is hard to beat. At the stroke of 8:30 p.m. on Saturday, March 27, nearly a billion people in more than 120 countries demonstrated their desire to do something about global warming by switching off their lights for an hour. In a show of official solidarity, the …

MELBOURNE: Google has withdrawn from China, arguing that it is no longer willing to design its search engine to block information that the Chinese government does not wish its citizens to have. In liberal democracies around the world, this decision has generally been greeted with enthusiasm. But in one of those liberal democracies, Australia, the …

TEL AVIV: The policy of Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s government on Jerusalem is ill conceived. This was amply demonstrated by the announcement of the construction of 1,600 new apartments in the occupied eastern part of the city during what was supposed to be a charm visit by US Vice-President Joe Biden, Israel’s best friend …

CAIRO: In the halls of the United Nation s New York bureau, officials have been considering a proposal to unify the UN’s many organizations promoting women’s equality and rights into a single “gender entity . This entity would have a greatly increased budget – exactly how much is still being debated – and would be …