The Cairo speech has eaten up most of my day, but last night, Bruce Riedel, the chairman of the Obama administration’s strategy review on Afghanistan and Pakistan, appeared on a panel at the International Spy Museum last night to talk about the Pakistani Inter Services Intelligence organization and its relationship to Afghan and Pakistani extremism. (More on that in a subsequent post.) During the Q&A, Riedel went off on the "Af-Pak" neologism that some in the administration use (or used to use) to indicate the interconnectedness of the two nations:
I don’t think anyone on this panel used the terminology "Af-Pak" and I’m glad they didn’t. I think it’s insulting. I don’t mean this personally. But I don’t think when we talk about two countries who are our putative allies and partners we should refer to them in a diminutive way. So let’s leave "Af-Pak" to USA Today and other newspapers that don’t have enough space to spell the names of our partners.
Crossposted to The Streak.



2 Comments
Support this site!
Subscribe to the newsletter
Advertise on Firedoglake
Send
us your tips
Make us your homepage
About ATTACKERMAN
RSS/XML Feed
Guess the plan to force a merger is off the table.
Good for Riedel! Though I notice in the following post that he, along with apparently the entire rest of the serious, respectable briefing world, uses the childish “bad guys” locution. Still, baby steps away from baby talk.