Foreign policy is increasingly becoming more and more crucial for a country's development as traditional national boundaries fall all around us under the pressure of globalization. In all countries, foreign policy formulation and its implementation are given extremely serious consideration and dealt with professionalism that is constantly being reviewed for higher standard. In Bangladesh , unfortunately we have not treated foreign affairs with the seriousness that it deserves and implementation mechanism makes our foreign policy handling anything but professional where the Foreign Ministry competes with a number of other Ministries/agencies in an environment that is not always cooperative.
Apart from the institutional weaknesses involved on the Government side, Bangladesh also suffers from the lack of organizations in the private sector that deal with foreign policy issues and render assistance to the Government in articulating the foreign policy issues in a coherent manner where all stake holders are brought into the equation. In any world capital, there are are many such organizations or think tanks. In Dhaka, only recently the Centre for Foreign Affairs Studies (CFAS) was created with the objective to fill this void.
In Dhaka at this point in time, there are a very large number of retired professional Ambassadors who have spent years in the area of formulation and implementation of Bangladesh's foreign policy. But there is no mechanism or little at the moment to bring their experiences into the loop. CFAS , in which I am a Director, has been envisaged to do this. This blog , an experimental one, has been designed to encourage others with background similar to mine to do so , so that we can together create a broad forum for exchange of thoughts and ideas with the intention to help the Government in the professional formulation and implementation of Bangladesh's foreign policy.
My blog is interactive, I would welcome readers' views on articles that I have posted and would post in future. Depending on what interest this blog creates, I have an intention to welcome issues from the readers for discussion on this blog site.
