AfPak

AfPak (also spelled Af-Pak) was a neologism used within United States foreign policy circles to designate Afghanistan and Pakistan as a single theater of operations.

[5] According to the U.S. 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.

[citation needed] In 2009, the National Security Advisor under the Barack Obama administration, James L. Jones, proposed reversing the term to "PakAf"; this proposal was met with staunch resistance in Pakistan due to its supposed suggestion that Pakistan was the primary source of difficulty in the War on Terror, according to Bob Woodward in his 2010 non-fiction book Obama's Wars.

[9] The term "AfPak" has entered the lexicon of geopolitics, and its usage implies that the primary fronts for the global war on terrorism were in Afghanistan and Pakistan at the time.

It has reinforced the message that the threat to United States from pro-terrorist activities masquerading as Islamic religious policy and the resulting infrastructure of fear and disarray in the two countries are intertwined.

[1] Official use of the term within the Obama administration has been echoed by the media, as in The Washington Post series The AfPak War[10] and The Af-Pak Channel, a joint project of the New America Foundation and Foreign Policy magazine that was launched in August 2009.

He mentions that the United States has lumped Pakistan with Afghanistan under "Af-Pak", a supposed diplomatic relegation, while India is lauded as a growing power.