Obama's hat tip to Afghan policewomen?

by Frank James

It was a subtle, but nonetheless very important pro-woman change President Barack Obama made in his Afghanistan-Pakistan speech today.

He changed a pronoun in a section of his speech where talked about the need for the U.S. and other nations to pay to train and equip Afghan security forces.

The speech as written for delivery read:

... Because it is far cheaper to train a policeman to secure their village or to help a farmer seed a crop, than it is to send our troops to fight tour after tour of duty with no transition to Afghan responsibility.

As he read, however, the speech, Obama changed the pronoun preceding "village" from "their" to "his or her."

He may have done this to make the sentence grammatically correct since its incorrect to use the third-person plural pronoun with a singular subject like "a policeman." Obama's obviously well-schooled and a writer to boot so his inner editor might have kicked in.

Or it could have been Obama acknowledging something that will come as news to many Americans -- that there are women police officers in Afghanistan.

Afghanistan's women police officers must be some of the bravest people in Afghanistan since they have been targeted for death by the Taliban merely for being women.

Obama mentioned his intention to support the human rights of women and girls and warned that allowing the Taliban to reclaim control of the country would threaten gains made by Afghanistan's females.

Which makes it more likely that his slight revision was meant to be more than just a grammatical fix.