What the West needs most is a fresh look at the full range of its capabilities and interests. Only then can its power fulfill its purpose. Seen as a wonder tool, smart power has been embraced as a fresh and benign aspect of power; a definably formulaic mix of soft (cultural) power and hard (military) power.

U.S. Embassy Kabul has awarded USD 3.1 million to support NATO's "SILK-Afghanistan" program, which provides high-speed Internet access to more than 9,000 students and teachers at Afghan universities in seven provinces (Baghlan, Faryab, Ghazni, Helmand, Kunduz, Paktia and Parvan).

Tommy Hilfiger has become one of the best selling international brands in India thanks to a little unexpected help from actor Shah Rukh Khan, says Mohan Murjani, who built the brand in the U.S. and brought it to India six years ago.

Historian and diplomat Joseph Nye gives us the 30,000-foot view of the shifts in power between China and the US, and the global implications as economic, political and "soft" power shifts and moves around the globe.

Washington is also unable to understand the nature of this geographic region, and how the foreign element is one of the most important factors fueling the conflict in this region. The problem that Washington and its elite are having [in understanding this] is that they are looking at the world from the perspective of the American experience, which is very simple...

When officials from Radio Liberty invited me along for a press trip to Jalalabad to watch them distribute radios to the population, I jumped at the chance. After all the gloom and doom of previous weeks, I was desperate for a feel-good story...

The US government has launched a major new initiative to link its aid agency USAID to the private and entrepreneurial sectors in a bid to promote technological innovation in the developing world.

Faced with dropping enrollment and revenue, the high school in this remote Maine town has fixed on an unlikely source of salvation: Chinese teenagers. Never mind that Millinocket is an hour’s drive from the nearest mall or movie theater, or that it gets an average 93 inches of snow a year.