Campaign References to Afghanistan Are Missing In Action
September 2, 2012, 12:31 am
By MARK MCDONALD
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.
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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 Sen. 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.”
http://rendezvous.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/09/02/references-to-afghanistan-are-missing-in-action/
