Why has the war in Afghanistan barely been mentioned during this election?

During this election campaign a figure of speech passed from novelty to cliché: ‘the elephant in the room’. Various elephants — spending cuts, the national debt, the reform of the NHS — were nominated for the role.

But one poor beast never even got into the room. The Afghan war has been distant from our thoughts. Dismal trumpeting sounds have been barely audible from savannahs far away. This was the subject from which, after a polite cough, everybody moved away. The only party prepared publicly to question the wisdom (as opposed to the conduct) of this war has been the British National Party. We should be ashamed.

We’re embroiled in a murderous conflict from which we feel unable to discuss escape. Our servicemen are dying almost daily in Afghanistan — two more deaths announced as I write — in what looks like a hopeless campaign in an operation we should never have taken on and which military intelligence warned we should never take on. Our principal ally, the United States, continues to sound an uncertain note on the trumpet, pouring in resources but agonising publicly about the prospects. Yet all these anxieties, which if they are to surface at all should have surfaced at a general election, have stayed buried. Meanwhile the regime we prop up disgraces itself, steeped in electoral fraud and financial corruption. We fight on, but nobody really believes President Karzai is worth supporting, or can, or should, have any place in Afghanistan’s future. Nobody, however, knows what that future should realistically be, or how to secure it. This too has remained undiscussed.

Our stated exit strategy — to withdraw after the capacity and calibre of the Afghan National Army has been built to a level permitting it to cope unassisted — implicitly anticipates an Afghan military costing vastly more than the country’s entire gross national product.