As they took pot-shots at each other on national security on Tuesday, the two American presidential candidates, the Democrat Barack Obama and the Republican John McCain, agreed on one important issue — the urgency of rejuvenating the faltering war against al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan. Renewed American attention to Afghanistan has been inevitable amidst the significantly improved security situation in Iraq over the last few months and the rapidly deteriorating conditions on the lawless frontier between Pakistan and Afghanistan. The weekend’s killing of nine American soldiers in Afghanistan in a bold raid by the Taliban militants has brought into sharp relief a simple new fact — the Pashtun belt across the Pakistani-Afghan border is replacing Iraq as the single-most important national security concern for the United States.

Since its invasion and occupation in 2003, Iraq has been a deeply divisive issue in American politics. Obama took full advantage of the unpopularity of the Iraq war to put his rival in the Democratic Party, Senator Hillary Clinton, on the defensive and consolidate his support among the liberal wing of the party. As part of his attempt to now move to the centre of the American political spectrum, Obama has tactically pitted the necessary but failing war in Afghanistan against what he calls President George W. Bush’s “misguided” war of choice in Iraq. By promising an early end to the war in Iraq — withdrawal of most troops by 2010 — Obama keeps faith with his liberal supporters. By sounding tough on Afghanistan and threatening to bomb Pakistan, he at the same time presents himself as a potentially muscular commander-in-chief for flag-waving centrists. This could help reduce the effect of the McCain campaign’s portrayal of the Democrats as being weak on national security. In any case, they have already compelled McCain to assert that he will pay as much attention to the war in Afghanistan as he devotes to that in Iraq.

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