Does Radio Free Europe still exist? A good yet bothersome question to ask, writes Anne Applebaum, the columnist and Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Gulag: A History, in her latest column for Slate.

Here's what Applebaum says about what many of our leaders deem a relic of the Cold War:

"In fact, [Radio Free Eurpoe is] as important as it ever was, at least in the 21 countries and 28 languages in which it is still often the only source of independent information: Persian for Iran, Arabic for Iraq, Dari and Pashto for Afghanistan, plus Turkmen, Azeri, Belarusian, Georgian, Chechen, Tajik, Albanian, Serbian, and Russian, among others. The fact that you haven't heard anyone mention RFE lately, let alone the achievements of its Afghan journalists, who provide much of the news in much of that country, says more about the poverty of the American foreign-policy debate in general (and this election-year debate in particular) than almost anything else. In RFE, we have an American institution that is admired, even beloved, in many difficult parts of the world, and yet we are slowly, methodically starving it to death."

"RFE has, it is true, a good number of admirers in Washington as well as a few constructive critics, usually people who wish it did more things better. What it does not have, however, is an advocate: someone, in Congress, in the White House, or on the campaign trail, who remembers that Americans have done "soft power" rather well in the past, that the collapse of the dollar is more than a minor irritant for rich tourists, that with better transmitters we could reach more Iranians, and that we could easily swap a few helicopters for better-informed Afghans."

We won't be able to win today's war fighting militarily on the world's battlefields alone. In a recent column on the President's emergency plan for AIDS relief (PEPFAR), I wrote about the strategic importance of "soft power" in winning the war. Policies like RFE and PEPFAR have done much to benefit many people suffering in fear and desperation. Once again, America has an opportunity to answer the call of freedom. This can only surely bring good to America and good to the world.