Prime Minister Syed Yusuf Raza Gilani...urged the Pakistani envoys designated at various countries to work for facilitating people to people contacts with the countries of their accreditation to open up new avenues of cooperation.

Such contacts also "prepare the grounds for taking the existing opportunities and potential and activated capacities in the relations between the two big countries of Iran and India and widening mutual understanding between the two nations," he added.

Sports diplomacy builds on Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton’s vision of “smart power.” It embraces the use of a full range of diplomatic tools, including sports, to bring individuals together in order to foster a greater understanding of societal norms and cultures.

Uniting families and promoting cultural exchange by ensuring opportunity to travel for all citizens should become a priority for all nations. Less political posturing and more "people to people" interaction through tourism is good for the future of humanity.

We are led to think that diplomacy is a function of this or that Secretary of State, or the exchanges between Presidents -- and of course, that's true. But the foundation of public diplomacy happens through the tight knots tied through high quality, high impact people to people encounters.

My title for this piece is intentionally ambiguous, because the relationship between the United States and Pakistan is utterly ambiguous. It could refer to Washington leaders saying, “Sorry that we violated your sovereignty to kill Osama bin Laden, but we still want to be friends.” Or it could refer to Americans saying, “We know some of your conservatives are sad to lose Osama, but we still want want to be friends.”

Two U.S. State Department employees — one who speaks out against anti-Semitism, the other against Islamaphobia – have teamed up to promote a global campaign to get young people to combat racial, ethnic and religious bigotry by volunteering their time for people unlike them.

Now, I don’t need to tell this audience that we know what the benefits are of these Open Skies agreements. They not only allow us to cross great distances, which I have been doing a lot of recently, but also to open up markets, create jobs, allow people in far -removed countries to interact, share information, and build businesses together.