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If anyone had said that the foreign policy followed by India's current prime minister bore any resemblance in shape or form to former premier Inder Kumar Gujral, he would have been laughed out of court.

Last week's outburst by Sri Lanka's President Chandrika Kumaratunga, when she roundly accused the prime minister of trying to kill her has been dismissed by most as an unseemly spat between two hard-nosed rivals.

For all the bonhomie in the Afghan capital last week, the signing of the Kabul Declaration on Good Neighbourly Relations was as much a statement of war as it was a covenant for peace.

Hamid Karzai marked his three months in office last week by reopening a school in Afghanistan's bleak capital Kabul, signalling a symbolic end to the former Taliban regime's cardinal blunder - their antediluvian, even medieval attitude towards women's employment and girls' education.

While its domestic policy may be subject to internal pulls and pressures exerted by a deeply divided polity, the Afghan interim administration's biggest success story may be its foreign policy.

The Lycee Jamhooriyat overlooks the heart of the old city of Kabul, but its run down interiors which were being spruced up last week to welcome several hundred girl students has its own story to tell.

Rarely has the attention of the Arab and Islamic world been so much focussed on a single visit. Or for that matter, raised as much hope. Amid a growing feeling that options for peace in the region are fast closing, much hinges on today's meeting between Saudi Arabia's Crown Prince Abdullah bin Abdulaziz and U.S. President George W. Bush.

India's 'look East' policy that took its Foreign Minister Jaswant Singh to China was an affirmation of the minister's much touted forward-looking foreign policy initiatives that have propelled India onto the world stage.

The foreign minister of Afghanistan's interim administration yesterday dismissed persistent fears over Afghanistan's nationhood, rocked by internecine battles between powerful warlords, ahead of a crucial assembly of elders, the Loya Jirga in June, saying "there are no instant solutions, no instant formulae".

Despite the global economic slowdown, and one of the worst droughts it has faced in recent years, Pakistan is set to post 3.5 per cent growth this year, up from 2.7 per cent last year, Pakistan's Finance Minister Shaukat Aziz said yesterday, while strongly defending his country's pace of reforms.

If anyone had any doubts that there are powerful forces, determined to wreck the nascent Kashmir peace process that is underway, Abdul Gani Lone's assassination yesterday will set them at rest.

It's already being dubbed Putin's Polka for the manner in which Russian President Vladimir Putin has choreographed the agenda at the Conference for Interaction and Confidence-building measures in Asia (CICA), that begins in the Kazakh capital Almaty today.