Tehrik-e-Niswan carried a message of peace and disarmament, laced with humour, to the first ever South Asian Women's Theatre Festival, held in India recently.

With all eyes on Pak-US Strategic Dialogue opening here today (Wednesday), Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi has called on the United States to "walk the talks" as people of Pakistan want meaningful and mutually cooperative relationship between the two countries.

US President Barack Obama's administration has promised to engage more deeply with Pakistan, which has long seen Washington as interested only in securing its military cooperation in the fight against the Taliban and al Qaeda.

Last month, just before the release of the Bollywood film My Name Is Khan, a message generated in Pakistan on the microblogging site Twitter was massively retweeted in Mumbai, India: "You might want to come to Karachi to catch MNIK's first day, first show!"

Indian Minister of State for External Affairs Parneet Kaur says the only way forward between Pakistan and India is talks and as responsible people they should go further up (from the bureaucratic level) but it was difficult to say how and when the talks would be taken further up.

In fact, there is a place -- crucial to U.S. national security -- where Obama's foreign policy is working: Pakistan. A spate of good news has been coming out of that complicated country, which has long promised to move against Islamic militants but has rarely done so.

Giving economy preference to security was an unimpressive show of imprudent diplomacy during Afghan President Hamid Karzai’s recent visit to Pakistan. The mild attitude that Pakistan had shown towards Afghan President reflected that Pakistani authorities were so obliged by Karzai’s arrival that they deemed it better not to get into serious discussions about security issues and stick to economy and trade.

Readers of this space know there’s been a recent flurry of public activity by those who set the course of U.S. communications efforts with foreign publics.