We still have 88,000 fighting troops in Afghanistan that are dying at a rate of one per day and it would seem that we just want to tune out that radio station. Obama referred to this as a “war of necessity,” but you will probably not hear about it on the campaign trail. It is not a popular topic at White House Press Conferences or at the water coolers in Washington, nor the halls of Congress.

We Americans are much more interested in hearing about the economy and if our taxes are going to go up instead of all the wars and rumors of wars. We are more absorbed in the political wars playing out on TV than the deadly fight still raging against the Afghan Taliban.

By the time we go to the polls to vote, this skirmish will be in its 12th year. Is it a novel idea anymore to fight a war that one can actually win, with a good lofty purpose for all of mankind? Public opinion is mostly negative toward the Afghan war.

Even a former U.S. Marine in Afghanistan responded, “We’re bored with it. We all laugh about how no one really cares,” Matthew Farwell now 29, studying at the University of Virginia said. “All the ‘support the troops’ stuff is bumper sticker deep.”

The war continues to drag on even though al-Qaida has been mostly driven out and Osama bin Laden was slain in a U.S. raid on his Pakistani hideout last year. We don’t seem to know how to pack up and leave Afghanistan.

Most Americans really are sympathetic to the predicament of the Afghan people, but have become deeply skeptical of President Hamid Karzai’s willingness to tackle the corruption problems and he’s not been able to move a medieval society into the modern world of today, says Ann Marlowe from a policy research organization in Washington.