Alex Brandon/Associated PressThe remains of Pfc. Patricia L. Horne arrived at Dover Air Force Base last Sunday. Private Horne, of Greenwood, Mississippi, was killed in Afghanistan. The war, the longest in U.S. history, has claimed some 2,000 American lives. HONG KONG — The war in Afghanistan — the longest conflict in U.S. history at 128 months and counting — was barely mentioned onstage at the Republican National Convention last week. The actor Clint Eastwood made a loopy and apparently unscripted reference to the war, but in his acceptance speech the presidential nominee, Mitt Romney, did not once bring up the A-word.
This was seen as a grievous sin of omission by one staunchly conservative analyst, William Kristol, editor of The Weekly Standard. Mr. Kristol, also a regular on Fox News, is a former columnist for Time magazine and The New York Times.
In a brief but pointed blog post entitled “What war?”, Mr. Kristol also was outraged that Mr. Romney, who has supported the war in Afghanistan, had failed to mention the Iraq war. In a separate magazine story, he called this “a failure of civic responsibility.”
“Leave aside the question of the political wisdom of Romney’s silence, and the opportunities it opens up for President Obama next week,” Mr. Kristol said in his post, referring to the upcoming Democratic National Convention. “What about the civic propriety of a presidential nominee failing even to mention, in his acceptance speech, a war we’re fighting and our young men and women who are fighting it?
“Has it ever happened that we’ve been at war and a presidential nominee has ignored, in this kind of major and formal speech, the war and our warriors?”
With plenty of fighting still ahead, already a forgotten war: stripes.com/news/americans…
— Heath Druzin (@Druzin_Stripes) August 22, 2012
If American fatalities in Afghanistan continue at their current rate — about one soldier per day on the battlefield — the death toll should reach 2,000 in a couple weeks. (More than 4,480 Americans died in the eight years of the Iraq war.)
The Defense Department says 1,980 U.S. soldiers have been killed in Afghanistan, not counting two fatalities on Saturday. Other groups and news organizations, including The New York Times, use various ways of reckoning the dead.
Tom Tarantino, an Iraq War veteran and chief policy officer with the Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans for America, told The Hill that veterans were not hearing enough from either candidate about Afghanistan or veterans’ issues.
Mr. Tarantino said he, too, was surprised not to hear a mention of either war in Mr. Romney’s acceptance speech: “When you’re applying for the job of commander in chief, you need to at the very least in your application speech make mention that we are a nation at war, and right now 85,000 men and women are fighting on the other side of the world for our country.”
A post on the defense blog of The Hill said: “While Romney has criticized Obama for setting a public timeline and the Obama campaign has accused Romney of wanting to stay in Afghanistan indefinitely, the candidates have nearly the same position on the drawdown in Afghanistan: they both back the 2014 timeline with a small presence remaining afterward for training and special operations.”
Mr. Romney’s campaign Web site says of the nominee, “Upon taking office, he will review our transition to the Afghan military by holding discussions with our commanders in the field,” and adds that he will “order a full interagency assessment of our military and assistance presence in Afghanistan.”
Arif Rafiq, a security and risk analyst with the Middle East Institute, in a recent column in The Express Tribune of Karachi, Pakistan, expressed his uncertainty about “whether a Romney administration would continue talks with the Afghan Taliban.”
“My guess is that it would attempt to engage a more moderate potential splinter group until it is mugged by reality and has to deal with the Taliban prime. But one wonders whether by then it would be too late.”
It remains to be seen whether Afghanistan will be a major talking point at the Democratic convention, which begins Tuesday in Charlotte, North Carolina. The Obama campaign has rarely mentioned the Afghan conflict this summer, although it is expected that Mr. Obama, his aides and leading Democrats at the convention will highlight the administration’s withdrawal of combat forces from Iraq and the killing of Osama bin Laden.
An Obama campaign official told my colleague Helene Cooper that Senator John Kerry, a decorated U.S. Navy veteran and the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, would speak on Thursday — the night scheduled for Mr. Obama’s renomination — about “how the president has restored America’s leadership in the world, has taken the fight to our enemies, and has a plan to bring our troops home from Afghanistan just like he did from Iraq.”
In an appearance Friday at Fort Bliss, Texas, Mr. Obama thanked a gathering of 5,000 U.S. troops for their service. He also formally signed an executive order authorizing the Veterans Administration to hire 1,600 new mental health professionals and expand its hotline for veterans in crisis.
More active-duty and reserve soldiers killed themselves last year, 278, than died in combat in Afghanistan last year, 247.
“Of course, it shouldn’t strike anyone as curious that the Romney campaign is as reluctant to talk about Afghanistan as the Obama administration,” said Andrew Exum, a U.S. Army veteran and former adviser to Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal in Afghanistan, writing in World Politics Review.
“After all, the war is terribly unpopular. The administration has apparently determined the safest thing to do politically is to chart a course toward withdrawal and otherwise pretend the United States does not still have tens of thousands of soldiers and marines fighting a determined enemy on a daily basis.
“For its part,” Mr. Exum said, “the Romney campaign has decided that criticizing the administration for not showing enough resolve in its prosecution of the war, thereby implying that Romney would prolong or increase the U.S. commitment in Afghanistan, is too politically risky. As a result, Romney has largely remained silent on the issue.”
Meanwhile, in recent days, it has been rough going for American, NATO and Afghan troops on the ground.
On Saturday, insurgents killed two American soldiers in Ghazni Province, and suicide bombers struck a combat outpost in Wardak Province near Kabul, killing 14 Afghans, including at least two civilians, and wounding 58. The Taliban spokesman Zabiullah Mujahid claimed responsibility for the assault on the base, the same facility that was attacked last Sept. 11, leaving 77 U.S. troopers wounded.
The New York Times’s calculations on fatalities in Afghanistan were described in a recent story by James Dao and Andrew Lehren. An interactive graphic is here and an explanatory post from the At War blog is here.
A graphic compiled by the reporter Heath Druzin of Stars & Stripes can be seen here, and charts from icasualties.org are here.
Regardless of how the fallen are counted, or where they fell or how they died, Lance Corp. Gregory T. Buckley Jr. of the U.S. Marines is among them, killed three weeks ago, apparently by a rogue Afghan soldier who turned on his American colleagues in what the military calls a green-on-blue attack. These intramural attacks have caused a rethink of U.S. and NATO training programs of Afghan police officers, soldiers and special forces, and some of those efforts have now been suspended.
In their story, James and Andrew spoke to Corporal Buckley’s mother, Marina Buckley, and as she “recounted things her son loved — basketball, girls, movies, the beach — bitterness choked her words.”
“Our forces shouldn’t be there,” Mrs. Buckley said. “It should be over. It’s done. No more.”