Highlighting the value of partnerships in pulling people out of turmoil through their socio-economic development, President Barack Obama on Tuesday said the United States is investing in education, health and welfare of the Pakistani and Afghan people.
He was stressing on the theme of partnerships "across regions and religions" in a speech to the annual meeting of the Clinton Global Initiative - an organisation devoted to forging partnership as a way to help resolve some of the pressing problems facing the people, particularly in disconnected corners of the world.
The US president, who is in New York for a series of diplomatic engagements during the UN General Assembly session, described the "spirit of partnership" as a "defining feature" of his administration's foreign policy. He touched on some of the urgent economic, political, security and environmental challenges confronting the world and focusing on Pakistan-Afghanistan region contrasted the destructive designs of extremists with productive results of partnerships.
"Around the world, even as we pursue a new era of engagement with other nations, we're embracing a broader engagement-new partnerships between societies and citizens, community organisations, business, faith-based groups.
"That's why we've been speaking directly to people around the world, including our friends across the Muslim world with whom we've launched a new beginnings based on mutual interests and mutual respect. In fact, this spirit of partnership is a defining feature of our foreign policy.
"Because government and the military can work to disrupt, dismantle and defeat terrorist networks. But while the violent extremists only destroy, we have to make it clear the kind of future we want to build. That's why we're investing in people's education, and health and welfare-as we are doing in Afghanistan. And we need to build new partnerships across regions and religions-and that requires religious leaders, and NGOs, citizens to help build the good governance, and transparent institutions and basic services upon which true security depends," he stated at the gathering that included top leaders from several countries.
"We stand at a transformational moment in world history when our interconnected world presents us at once with great promise, but also with great peril.
"The very technologies that empower us to create and build also empower those who would destroy and disrupt-the extremists in the mountains of Afghanistan and Pakistan who fuel attacks from New York to London to Bali, from Mombasa to Madrid to Mumbai."
Finding a linkage between problems afflicting the world, he observed that "reckless speculation in any financial sector of the world, or someone's failure to pay a mortgage in Florida, can contribute to a global recession that undermines all of us. Poverty in Somalia, the poppy fields of Afghanistan, the northbound flow of drugs from Colombia and the southbound flow of American guns and cash into Mexico-all this fuels violence that endangers each and every one of us. A flu that starts in one country can become a pandemic that sickens millions."
Applauding the CGI - spearheaded by former US President Bill Clinton, Obama said he said the spirit of service is something personal to him. "I first saw it in my mother-she was an anthropologist who dedicated her life to understanding and improving the lives of the rural poor, from Indonesia to Pakistan. Whether working with USAID or the Asian Development Bank, the Ford Foundation, Bank Rakyat in Jakarta or Women's World Banking here in New York, she championed the cause of women's welfare and helped pioneer the micro loans that have helped lift millions from poverty."
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