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Obama Urged to Rally Support for War

WASHINGTON -- The White House is facing mounting pressure from lawmakers to work harder to rally flagging public support for the war in Afghanistan.

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With casualties rising, the administration is struggling to persuade voters that the war can be won or is worth the human and financial costs. Afghanistan is President Barack Obama's top foreign-policy priority, but recent polls show that a majority of voters oppose the war for the first time since the conflict began eight years ago.

In the U.S., a growing number of lawmakers say that Mr. Obama needs to make the case for Afghanistan more forcefully -- and more frequently -- than he has done to date.

"The president, unfortunately, because of the crush of everything else, hasn't talked about Afghanistan all that much," said Sen. Bob Casey, a centrist Democrat from Pennsylvania, in an interview. "There's so much on his plate that it has an adverse impact on his ability to spend enough time on Afghanistan."

The president's most extensive recent comments about Afghanistan came in an Aug. 17 speech to a Veterans of Foreign Wars convention in Phoenix, where he devoted less than three minutes of a half-hour speech to a conflict he described as "a war of necessity." Since then, most of Mr. Obama's public remarks have focused on health care.

White House officials said there were no plans for Mr. Obama to address the Afghan war in a major speech in the near future. Tommy Vietor, an administration spokesman, said that "the president talks about Afghanistan all the time."

"There are a lot of critical issues the president deals with every day, and a lot of critical issues he talks about," Mr. Vietor said. "Afghanistan is on the top of his list."

(Full article here).