| 00:00:30 | Well, we’re going to be finished by 2014. And when I’m President, we’ll make sure we bring our troops out by the end of 2014. The commanders and the generals there are on track to do so. We’ve seen progress over the last several years. The surge has been successful, and the training program is proceeding apace. There are a large number of Afghan security forces -- 350,000 -- that are ready to step in to provide security, and we’re going to be able to make that transition by the end of 2014. So our troops will come home at that point. |
| 00:01:03 | I can tell you at the same time that we will make sure that we look at what’s happening in Pakistan and recognize that what’s happening in Pakistan is going to have a major impact on the success in Afghanistan. And I say that because I know a lot of people just feel like we should brush our hands and walk away -- and I don't mean you, Mr. President -- but some people in our nation feel that Pakistan isn’t being nice to us and that we should just walk away from them. |
| 00:01:30 | Pakistan is important to the region, to the world, and to us, because Pakistan has a hundred nuclear warheads, and they're rushing to build a lot more. They’ll have more than Great Britain sometime in the relatively near future. They also have the Haqqani Network and the Taliban existent within their country. |
| 00:01:49 | And so a Pakistan that falls apart, becomes a failed state, would be of extraordinary danger to Afghanistan and to us. And so we’re going to have to remain helpful in encouraging Pakistan to move towards a more stable government and rebuild a relationship with us. And that means that our aid that we provide to Pakistan is going to have to be conditioned upon certain benchmarks being met. So for me, I look at this as both a need to help move Pakistan in the right direction and also to get Afghanistan to be ready, and they will be ready by the end of 2014. |
| 00:02:25 | Mr. President. |
| 00:02:26 | When I came into office, we were still bogged down in Iraq, and Afghanistan had been drifting for a decade. We ended the war in Iraq, refocused our attention on Afghanistan. And we did deliver a surge of troops. That was facilitated in part because we had ended the war in Iraq. And we are now in a position where we have met many of the objectives that got us there in the first place. |
| 00:02:53 | Part of what had happened is we had forgotten why we had gone. We went because there were people who were responsible for 3,000 American deaths. And so we decimated al Qaeda’s core leadership in the border regions between Afghanistan and Pakistan. We then started to build up Afghan forces, and we're now in a position where we can transition out, because there’s no reason why Americans should die when Afghans are perfectly capable of defending their own country. |
| 00:03:24 | That transition has to take place in a responsible fashion. We’ve been there a long time, but we’ve got to make sure that we and our coalition partners are pulling out responsibly and giving Afghans the capabilities that they need. |
| 00:03:43 | But what I think the American people recognize is after a decade of war, it’s time to do some nation-building here at home. And what we can now do is free up some resources to, for example, put Americans back to work -- especially our veterans -- rebuilding our roads, our bridges, our schools; making sure that our veterans are getting the care that they need when it comes to Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and Traumatic Brain Injury; making sure that the certifications that they need for good jobs of the future are in place. |
| 00:04:15 | I was having lunch with some -- a veteran in Minnesota who had been a medic dealing with the most extreme circumstances. When he came home and he wanted to become a nurse, he had to start from scratch. And what we’ve said is let’s change those certifications. The First Lady has done great work with an organization called Joining Forces, putting our veterans back to work. And as a consequence, veterans’ unemployment is actually now lower than the general population; it was higher when I came into office. |
| 00:04:42 | So those are the kinds of things that we can now do because we’re making that transition in Afghanistan. |
| 00:04:49 | All right, let me go to Governor Romney, because you talked about Pakistan and what needs to be done there. General Allen, our commander in Afghanistan, says that Americans continue to die at the hands of groups who are supported by Pakistan. We know that Pakistan has arrested the doctor who helped us catch Obama -- bin Laden. It still provides safe haven for terrorists. Yet we continue to give Pakistan billions of dollars. Is it time for us to divorce Pakistan? |
What would you do if Afghanistan is not ready for a transition of power in 2014?
Clipped from: Presidential Candidates DebateOct 22, 2012
Questions from Presidential Debate at Lynn University