In contrast to Christian Brose, I think there is nothing inherently wrong with the term “Af-Pak” to describe the hornet’s nest of problems related to Afghanistan and Pakistan (starting with, say, there was never any partition to dog the term like the Clintonian “Indo-Pak”). But after reading Spencer Ackerman’s dispatches from the so-called “Af-Pak Hearings”—in which the participants mouth the same old platitudes they have for years and thus don’t advance the issue at all—I’ve decided even saying the term to myself is like fingernails on chalk. Really, it is just a grating, terrible sounding word.
Can we pretty please drop it from our common usage, PLEASE?
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This post was written by...
Joshua Foust – author of 1801 posts on Registan.net.
Joshua Foust is a Fellow at the American Security Project and the author of Afghanistan Journal: Selections from Registan.net. His research focuses primarily on Central and South Asia. Joshua is a correspondent for The Atlantic and a columnist for PBS Need to Know. Joshua appears regularly on the BBC World News, Aljazeera, and international public radio. Joshua is also a regular contributor to Foreign Policy’s AfPak Channel, and his writing has appeared in the New York Times, Reuters, and the Christian Science Monitor. Follow him on twitter: @joshuafoust
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Did you see the comments by John McCain that Afghanistan and Pakistan were not linked and that success in one did not relate to the other? I don’t think you’re saying that you can go this far with compartmentalizing U.S. strategy. This brings me to my actual question: what term would you use?