The War in Afghanistan. We've spent enormous blood and treasure on this adventure, yet it almost never shows up in most daily papers. The candidates for president almost never discuss it. In eleven years, no one has articulated why it is that we have invested so heavily in being there for eleven years. The official platitudes are based on horrific lies. No politician wants to discuss that our "ally" Pakistan is encouraging the Afghanistan insurgency. What should we say to the families of the soldiers who died there? Your loved ones died for what? "Freedom!" scream the politicians. No politician has discussed all of the things we could have done with that money had we truly invested in something permanent and valuable rather than something wasteful, tribal and destructive. No candidate has stated the obvious: We have been propping up a corrupt regime in Afghanistan. And the media cooperates with all of the above ignorance, making Afghanistan a bloodless, vague, distant thing that we don't know anything about, and we, as a nation, don't care that we know nothing about it. No one in power wants to admit that fighting wars is good insurance for re-election, or that it simply makes us feel like we're doing something meaningful and patriotic to fight a war, even an insane war.