AfPak

AfPak (or Af-Pak) was a neologism used within US foreign policy circles to designate Afghanistan and Pakistan as a single theater of operations. The neologism reflects the policy approach introduced by the Obama administration, which regarded the region of Afghanistan and Pakistan as having a single, dominant political and military situation that required a joint policy in the War on Terror.

Following sharp criticism from Pakistan, condemning the perceived comparison of their country with Afghanistan, the US Government stopped using the term in 2010.

Michael Quinion writes that the term began appearing in newspaper articles in February 2009. The term was popularized, and possibly coined, by Richard Holbrooke, the Obama administration's Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan. In March 2008 (a year before he assumed that post) Holbrooke explained the motivation behind the term:

First of all, we often call the problem AfPak, as in Afghanistan Pakistan. This is not just an effort to save eight syllables. It is an attempt to indicate and imprint in our DNA the fact that there is one theater of war, straddling an ill-defined border, the Durand Line, and that on the western side of that border, NATO and other forces are able to operate. On the eastern side, it’s the sovereign territory of Pakistan. But it is on the eastern side of this ill-defined border that the international terrorist movement is located.

According to the US government, the common policy objective was to disrupt, dismantle, and prevent Al Qaeda and its affiliates from having a safe haven from which it can continue to operate and plot attacks against the U.S and its allies. This policy decision represented a shift from previous ways of thinking about Afghanistan as an independent problem that required a military solution. The AfPak strategy was an attempt to win the “hearts and minds” of the Afghan and Pakistani people.

The term AfPak has entered the lexicon of geopolitics, and has made clear to the world that the primary fronts for the global war on terrorism lie in Afghanistan and Pakistan. It has reinforced the message that the threat to US from Islamic religious policy, and the resulting fear infrastructure and problems in the two countries are intertwined.

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