Tag Archives: foreign policy

Pakistanis See the US as the Biggest Threat

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The Al Jazeera network has commissioned a public opinion survey in Pakistan that has yielded some disturbing and surprising results.  The poll, conducted by Gallup Pakistan, showed that 59% of Pakistani’s believe that the United States is the biggest threat to Pakistan.

That many Pakistanis see the US as a threat is entirely surprising, but the margins are.  Tensions between India and Pakistan are legendary and longstanding and the Taliban is a brutal militant Islamist regime.   Think about that for a moment.  A major source of the resentment seems to be the drone attacks against Taliban and Al Qaeda targets.

(W)hen asked if they support or oppose the US military’s drone attacks against what Washington claims are Taliban and al-Qaeda targets, only nine per cent of respondents reacted favourably.

A massive 67 per cent say they oppose US military operations on Pakistani soil.

Forty-one per cent of Pakistanis say they support the offensive against the Taliban

“This is a fact that the hatred against the US is growing very quickly, mainly because of these drone attacks,” Makhdoom Babar, the editor-in-chief of Pakistan’s The Daily Mail newspaper, said.

It means, these medicines are midwayfire.com cialis 20 mg really safe to use so you can try them and notice the improvement in your digestion. These cheapest prices on cialis are compounds which damage cell membranes, tamper with DNA, and even cause death of cells. It had a negative impact on my enter career and family life for I viagra samples uk started to get short tempered and moody. Except medication, lifestyle changes is also one of the factors responsible viagra spain for causing ED in men, but not the only motive. “Maybe the intelligence channels, the military channels consider it productive, but for the general public it is controversial … the drone attacks are causing collateral damage,” he told Al Jazeera.

A senior US official told Al Jazeera he was not surprised by the poll’s findings.

The US has a considerable amount of work to do to make itself better understood to the Muslim world, he said.

And it would take not only educational and economic work to win over the Pakistani people but also a concerted effort to help the Pakistani government deal with “extremist elements” that are trying to disrupt security within Pakistan, he added.

via Al Jazeera English – CENTRAL/S. ASIA – Pakistanis see US as biggest threat.

Complete survey results are at this link.

Study Abroad Blogs

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Recently I was asked for information on blogs associated with abroad programs. I’m posting the information here in case it is useful to anyone else. It’s just a few links that came to mind. I know there are many others and I will post them when I remember them. Please, also, post them in the comments if you know of any.

Student blogging from abroad, in a structured manner, is common. What is less common is innovative or pedagogically sound uses of it. There is a very interesting project supported by National Geographic called Glimpse. This is a user-generated, professionally edited website in which students and others post blogs, images, travel tips, etc. In addition to the site, there is a magazine that you can pick up a newsstands here and there. It’s a handsome, glossy publication.

One of the earliest projects of this sort (2005-2006) that I am aware of was the Blogging the World project involving Middlebury, Haverford and Dickinson.

Some International Education offices use a blog for practical reasons, simply to post news, such as this from my undergraduate alma mater, VCU.

Others, like Bucknell, consolidate student postings into a central blog.
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At Cornell students maintain blogs and the links are collected on a central page.

There are some study abroad podcasts, too. Here’s the Japan Study Abroad podcast.
I haven’t listened to it because I don’t speak Japanese, so I can’t tell you what is it about.

Here are Pacific University’s Study Abroad Podcasts.

There are more study abroad podcasts in the iTunes podcast directory, if you go to iTunes and simply search on “study abroad.”

A Good Article on Liz Cheney and Her Criticism of Obama on Foreign Policy

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Well this is comforting.  In my RSS feed from The Guardian I found this article by Matthew Harwood analyzing another article by Liz Cheney, daughter of the former Vice-President, criticizing recent speeches made by President Obama on US relations with the rest of the world.  Apparently Cheney has declared herself open to running for political office and it appears her philosophies are very close to those of her father.

So to the extent that familiarity is comforting and better the devil you know than the devil you don’t, we’ll have the possibility of a continuing dynasty including both the Bush girls AND the Cheneys!  Well, at least it will be progress in that the heirs to the dynasty will be women.

Cheney sees the view in simple us v. them terms, just like her father.  Harwood explains,

Her argument is as simplistic as it is ridiculous: Obama doesn’t spread the myth of American exceptionalism and thus engages in historical revisionism, which emboldens our enemies and hurts America. A high-level official in the Bush state department and a ferocious defender of her father’s legacy, Cheney sees Obama’s recent speeches in Trinidad and Tobago, Cairo and Moscow as either “an attempt to push ‘reset’ – or maybe to curry favour” with our enemies.

These are reusable and can be cleaned after female viagra samples every utilization moment. It can 5mg cialis tablets be physically and sincerely attempting, and can make us feel helpless against the conclusions and judgments of others. You can look through forums and online product reviews to find one that is best suited to getting viagra in canada you. Acai juice has tremendous health properties and could be a nightmare at times and so people must take an initiative and do something cialis brand out of it in order to have greater vigour and stay in bed. Why? Because Obama hasn’t defended the standard tropes of the US cold war mythology in his own speeches or rebutted foreign leaders’ less forgiving take on US foreign policy.

According to Cheney, Obama should tell our adversaries:

“America was an unmatched force for good in the world during the cold war. The Soviets were not. The cold war ended not because the Soviets decided it should but because they were no match for the forces of freedom and the commitment of free nations to defend liberty and defeat communism.”

I won’t go on.  Harwood’s article is the thing to read.  It’s good.

Human Costs of Guantanamo Prison

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Camp DeltaThe closing of “Gitmo” is long overdue, there is no doubt about it. But shutting it down is more difficult than one might think. This post contains two articles that illustrate the problem. They are not the best or the most compelling, they are simply the two that showed up on my computer screen today. Tomorrow there will be another. Where are those people to go? In some cases they have to homes to return to, in others they are persecuted in their home country. In other cases their country of origin doesn’t want them back. Others are stateless.

We have prisoners who have been detained there since the beginning of our invasions in Iraq and Afghanistan who have never been charged with a crime and who, in many cases, are innocent. But if it is true that prisoners in the regular American penal system are hardened by the system and more likely to be come recidivist, what happens when that facility is a military run prison camp. And what happens with the prisoner, once just a taxi driver or farmer in the wrong place at the wrong time, is locked up next to folks who are, in fact, ruthless radical religious terrorists? What is that person going to think of Western democracy and Western systems of justice when he spends years in a prison without even the semblance of due process? I shudder to think!

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For Gitmo Uighurs, new life is no walk on the beach
Photo by writingJulie @flickr