This morning's This morning's bombings in Pakistan are a good reminder of an important difference in the November election: John McCain is extremely weak on Afghanistan and Pakistan. He sees it as a much lower priority than Iraq. At CPAC, for example, when McCain said he supported President Bush in the surge in Iraq, and said he would keep troops in Iraq indefinitely, he was implicitly advocating the transferring of resources away from Pakistan and Afghanistan (which he didn't even mention).
Resources are finite, after all. America only has so much money, so many troops, so many special forces, so many counterinsurgency specialists, so much body armor, etc. Every tank and soldier sent to Iraq is one less that could be sent to Afghanistan. As Peter Bergen, among others, has detailed, underfunding Afghanistan has drastically wounded the U.S. effort there. Arabic speakers from the CIA and the National Security Agency, Arabic-speaking Special Operations soldiers, and reconstruction dollars all continue to be drawn down in Iraq, instead of in Afghanistan and Pakistan. For all the Republican talk of the Democrats surrendering in Iraq, they are causing America to lose a far more vital war in the process. As more bombs go off in Pakistan in the coming months and the nuclear-armed country falls apart, the Bush administration's abandonment of the region is proving to be one of the most serious threats to American national security.
---Jordan Michael Smith
