Afghanistan

Things are getting ugly in Afghanistan. Taliban insurgents somehow managed to penetrate the coalition’s main base in Helmand Province, Camp Bastion, and blow up six Marine Corps Harrier jump jets and damage two others, making this the greatest single-day loss of American warplanes since the Vietnam war. (The Harrier squadron commander, Lt. Col. Christopher Raible, was killed in the attack.) Another Taliban suicide bomber struck in Kabul, killing a dozen people, including contract workers for the U.S. embassy.

In the Wall Street Journal, Bill McGurn writes about Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney's disappointing silence on Afghanistan:

We’re at war. More than 68,000 troops are deployed to Afghanistan. More than 2,000 Americans have died in over 10 years of fighting. The war has quiet bipartisan support. Too quiet.

The United States has some 68,000 troops fighting in Afghanistan. Over two thousand Americans have died in the more than ten years of that war, a war Mitt Romney has supported.

Spirit of America is a wonderful charity that helps provide equipment—or whatever else is needed—to help American soldiers complete their mission in Afghanistan. We last wrote about their successful campaign to raise money to get cleft palate surgery for two Afghan children, and WEEKLY STANDARD readers promptly pitched in to help fund their efforts.

Fred Barnes, with A.B. Stoddard and Charles Krauthammer, last night on Fox News:

The presidential candidates should listen to Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta when he reminds us that there is still a war being fought in Afghanistan. And we should remember what Panetta’s predecessor, Robert Gates, had to say about Afghanistan in 2010, too.

One of the minor disgraces of this year's campaign is that the presidential candidates act as if the war in Afghanistan doesn't exist. We have 84,000 troops fighting over there in very difficult circumstances; they've had a tough few weeks, with 41 killed in the last month, but the candidates barnstorm the country with barely a mention of the war or the troops.

During the 2008 presidential campaign, Barack Obama famously said that the U.S. should negotiate with Iran without any preconditions. Obama’s notion of diplomacy with the mullahs was widely ridiculed at the time, including by his then rival for the Democratic nomination, Hillary Clinton. More than three years into the Obama administration, multiple attempts at negotiations with the Iranians over their nuclear program have not led to any progress.

Max Boot reviews Little America by Rajiv Chandrasekaran in the Wall Street Journal:

When it comes to the conflict in Afghanistan, Americans are war-weary. A Washington Post/ABC poll this spring found that two-thirds of those surveyed now believe that “the war in Afghanistan has not been worth fighting.” Nearly the same percentage in an April Pew poll wanted to “remove troops as soon as possible.” And this followed on the heels of a March CNN/ORC International survey that had 72 percent of its respondents saying they “oppose the U.S. war in Afghanistan.”

At the Washington Free Beacon, Bill Gertz has a piece about Jose Rodriguez, the former chief of the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center. Rodriguez warns that the CIA is “out of the business” of interrogating senior al Qaeda terrorists and this will eventually lead to a hole in America’s counterterrorism efforts, if it hasn’t already. Time will tell if Rodriguez is right. The Obama administration is betting that he isn’t, and that by killing select al Qaeda leaders in drone strikes the terrorist threat is fully neutralized. There are significant problems with the Obama administration’s approach, even absent the prickly debate over interrogations.