DeMint presses Obama on Afghanistan

By JAMES ROSEN - jrosen@mcclatchydc.com

Democratic candidate’s campaign says S.C. senator’s actions ‘politically motivated’

WASHINGTON — U.S. Sen. Jim DeMint injected himself into the presidential debate on national security by writing U.S. Sen. Barack Obama a letter Tuesday urging the two senators hold hearings on Afghanistan.

On Tuesday, DeMint made a high-profile appearance with Sen. John McCain’s senior foreign policy aides as McCain and Obama delivered speeches laying out sharply differing views on Iraq, Afghanistan and the broader U.S. effort to defeat fundamentalist Muslim forces.

Obama is chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee’s subcommittee on European affairs, and DeMint is its senior Republican member. The subcommittee has jurisdiction to convene hearings on Afghanistan because NATO troops there are allied with U.S. forces.

“The success of Afghanistan is critical to the future of NATO and vital to our efforts to defeat al- Qaida and the Taliban,” DeMint wrote Obama. “As the situation in Afghanistan grows more tense, it is time for us to hold a hearing on the mission there.”

Obama and McCain, the presumptive Democratic and Republican presidential nominees, focused on Afghanistan two days after an insurgent attack killed nine U.S. soldiers and wounded 14, the highest American single-day death toll there in three years.

“I believe as we’ve made progress in Iraq, we’ve seen deterioration in Afghanistan,” DeMint said in a conference call with reporters the McCain campaign arranged.

“My concern is not just with Barack but (with) the committee itself and not having any hearings on Afghanistan over the last year and a half on our subcommittee,” DeMint said. “We have missed a lot of opportunities to take more responsibility and to bring to public light the problems.”

Obama didn’t respond directly to DeMint. Instead, Obama’s aides sent e-mails with past quotes from Obama backers responding earlier this year to similar criticisms from U.S. Sen. Hillary Clinton during the Democratic primary season.

One e-mail from the Obama campaign noted DeMint had failed to attend a subcommittee hearing April 7 on diplomatic nominations by President Bush.

“It reveals the critique (by DeMint) as politically motivated,” said Tommy Vietor, an Obama spokesman.

Obama aides added the European affairs subcommittee Obama chairs wouldn’t be the appropriate panel to hold Afghanistan hearings, pointing instead to the subcommittee on Near East and South Asian affairs.

DeMint, who has been cited as a possible McCain running mate, backed Mitt Romney during the GOP primary campaign. Fellow S.C. U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham, a Republican from Seneca, is a close McCain confidant and frequent travel companion.

Obama, a first-term Illinois Democrat, called Tuesday for moving at least two U.S. military brigades — about 7,000 troops — from Iraq to Afghanistan.

In the Washington speech intended to burnish his credentials as a potential commander in chief, Obama repeated his pledge to remove U.S. combat troops from Iraq within 16 months after taking office. He pledged to send at least two more combat brigades to Afghanistan to quell the growing Taliban insurgency.

The Iraq war “distracts us from every threat that we face and so many opportunities we could seize,” said Obama, who is preparing his first trip to Iraq and Afghanistan. “As president, I will make the fight against al-Qaida and the Taliban the top priority that it should be. This is a war that we have to win.”

In his address, McCain advocated sending even more fresh troops to Afghanistan — three brigades, or 10,500 troops — but he and his aides stopped short of saying those troops should come from Iraq.

“I know how to win wars,” McCain, an Arizona Republican, said in Albuquerque, N.M. “And if I’m elected president, I will turn around the war in Afghanistan, just as we have turned around the war in Iraq.”

McCain mocked Obama for laying out his plans for Iraq and Afghanistan before visiting the war-torn nations and meeting with U.S. commanders there.

“In my experience, fact-finding missions usually work the other way around. First you assess the facts on the ground, then you present a new strategy.”

Despite participating in an overtly political conference call arranged by the McCain campaign, DeMint cast his request for Afghanistan hearings in bipartisan terms.

“I’m calling on Senator Obama to work with me to have hearings, to help bring to light the issues in Afghanistan, to put pressure on the (Bush) administration and others to act decisively there before the situation deteriorates more,” DeMint said.

Rosen covers Washington for McClatchy Newspapers in South Carolina. McClatchy staff writer Warren P. Strobel contributed.