Will Afghanistan Violence hurt McCain Campaign?

Afghan guerrillas used small arms fire to down a US helicopter south of Kabul. The crew was unharmed. More US & coalition troops were killed in Afghanistan in May and June than in Iraq.

Meanwhile, guerrillas used a roadside bomb to kill 5 Afghan troops in Logan, central Afghanistan. There was also a major firefight between the Afghan army and a group characterized as "Taliban" in Badghis in the northwest.

David Corn at Mother Jones asks if Afghanistan will explode as a campaign issue in the US, and whether that development will harm the prospects of John McCain, who has instead put his eggs in the Iraq basket. Barack Obama has argued that the US should have focused on al-Qaeda in Pakistan and Afghanistan instead.

Things are not going well in Pakistan, either, where the new government is quickly squandering its credibility. There are questions about whether it is fighting or dealing with the Pakistani Taliban. The issue of the reinstatement of the Supreme Court remains unresolved, splitting the government.

And then there is the looming crisis in Turkey, where favorability ratings for the US in polls have fallen from nearly three fifths of the population to almost no one.

Aljazeera English on the struggle between secularism and Muslim-tinged politics in Turkey: