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Afghan president delivers speech on leadership at Columbia University

Xinhua, March 27, 2015 Adjust font size:

Afghan President Ashraf Ghani is making full use of his first official visit to the United States to underscore his personal bond with the country.

After whirlwind diplomacy in Washington where he developed warm personal relations with President Barack Obama, Ghani came to New York City on Thursday for the World Leaders Forum hosted by Columbia University where he earned a doctorate on anthropology.

Warmly welcomed by the Columbia University's president as an alumni, Ghani delivered a 35-minute academic speech on the leadership in the public sector.

"Leadership mostly comes from business schools. Leadership thinking is mostly under theorized in public sector," Ghani said.

Cracking jokes about study experiences in the Columbia University, the president shared with the students about his understanding of the public sector's leadership from four perspectives.

"The first dimension of public leadership is about one particular characteristic. It is about how to recognize change of context and to respond to changed context," he said.

The second is about judgement and turning information into knowledge, and the third lies in the accountability to the citizens, he said.

The last one is the need for temporal thinking, Ghani said. "These different but related perspectives are all needed to create leadership within political institutions."

The speech, more like an academic lecture than a political one, reminds one of his teaching at American universities for a couple of years after graduating from Columbia University.

Ghani, who started his presidency last September, was currently on a week-long state visit to the United States to lay the groundwork for new relations between the two countries after more than a decade of troubled ties under the leadership of his predecessor, Hamid Karzai.

His first visit to the United States included meetings with Obama, Secretary of State John Kerry, and Defense Secretary Ash Carter.

He also addressed a joint session of Congress on Wednesday. He warned that extremist groups such as Islamic State (IS) pose a "grave and present danger" to Afghanistan's security transition and vowed his war-wracked country will be self-reliant within this decade. Endi