Foreign Aid

If Washington wishes to improve relations with Pakistan, it needs to stop regarding Pakistan as an ally, and to start regarding it as an enemy — at least as far as the Afghan War is concerned.

Seeing Pakistan as an ally has not only obscured the reality of the situation, but has bred exaggerated bitterness at Pakistani “treachery.” And since Pakistanis also believe that America has “betrayed” them, the result is a thin veneer of friendship over a morass of mutual distrust and even hatred.

Twelve Americans died this weekend in Afghanistan when a car packed with explosives struck a NATO armored bus. It would be nice if someone in the media took a break from investigating Herman Cain's sex life to ask the people running for president what these Americans gave their lives for.

“In 1948, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights called for social protection for all in the form of adequate life standards, access to health, education, food, housing, and social security …Despite the six decades of strong economic growth that followed [its] adoption, access to adequate social protection, benefits and services remains a privilege offered to relatively few people.”

Since July, at least 745 people have been killed and 8 million affected by monsoon rains and flooding across Southeast Asia. In response to the floods of the past week, a number of countries pledged assistance: U.S. Marines arrived in Bangkok last Saturday with equipment and sandbags; China has provided 64 rescue boats and water-purifying equipment; Japan has come forward with tents, blankets, mattresses and electricity generators.

While a growing number of influential voices here and in the region insist that the nearly 20-year, U.S.-sponsored "peace process" has reached its terminal phase, the administration of President Barack Obama remains committed to reviving direct negotiations between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO).

"…[M]oving forward, we want to see progress on the peace talks," State Department spokesman Mark Toner has emphasised repeatedly over the last two weeks, which have seen Washington's special envoy David Hale shuttling between Jerusalem and Ramallah.

We usually speak of "alternative energy sources" as positives. Across the developing world, however, these "alternatives" take the forms of dung and wood for cooking, candles and kerosene for lighting. Governments have done an absolutely dismal job of rolling out access to modern energy.

On any given morning, Dr. Hawa Abdi wakes at 5 o’clock, ties a cloth over the scar where a brain tumor was removed several years ago, and walks a few hundred feet to the 400-bed hospital she started more than 25 years ago near Mogadishu. Since opening as a one-room clinic, the hospital has grown into a camp for 90,000 displaced Somalis, most of them women and children. They’ve fled to Mama Hawa, as Abdi is called, seeking haven from decades of war and, now, the worst famine in 60 years.

The Green Bay Packers this year beat the Pittsburgh Steelers to win Super Bowl XLV in Arlington, Texas. In parts of the developing world, however, an alternate reality exists: "Pittsburgh Steelers: Super Bowl XLV Champions" appears emblazoned on T-shirts from Nicaragua to Zambia. The shirt wearers, of course, are not an international cadre of Steelers die-hards, but recipients of the many thousands of excess shirts the National Football League produced to anticipate the post-game merchandising frenzy.

Ileana Ros-Lehtinen is the Republican chair of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, and when it comes to matters Israeli-Palestinian she tends not to mince her words. Here is but one choice example: "It's time for us to kick the PLO out of the U.S. once and for all, and move our embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, where it belongs."

With the old peace process precariously poised between Palestinian flirtations with seeking international redress, U.S. congressional threats to funding, and Middle East Quartet incantations to resume negotiations, October promises to be just as rhetorically intense on the Israel-Palestine front as was the long-awaited September. Much depends on one's reading of Israel's man at the helm -- Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.