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Romney exaggerates meager comments on Afghanistan

While GOP president candidate Mitt Romney suggested in a TV interview aired Sunday that he laid out a detailed policy plan for Afghanistan in a recent speech to the American Legion, his comments to that group late last month said nothing about what substantive policy the U.S. should follow in the decade-plus-long conflict.

In an interview for NBC's "Meet The Press," host David Gregory pressed Romney about his failure to mention Afghanistan during his Republican National Convention acceptance speech. Romney said in reply that too much focus was being put on his rhetoric and on that single high-profile address.

"I find it interesting that people are curious about mentioning words in a speech as opposed to policy. And so I went to the American Legion the day before I gave that speech," Romney said. "I went to the American Legion and spoke with our veterans there, and described my policy as it relates to Afghanistan and other foreign policy and our military. I've been to Afghanistan, and the members of our troops know of my commitment to Afghanistan and to the effort that's going on there. I have some differences on policy with the president. I happen to think those are more important than what word I mention in each speech.” (Emphasis added.)

A casual viewer of the NBC interview would likely think that Romney laid out a detailed policy prescription on Afghanistan in his August 29 speech to the Legion. However, as I and my colleague Reid Epstein noted before, the GOP nominee did not. In a 16-minute speech, he devoted, at most, 15 or 16 seconds to Afghanistan. Even then, it was only a note that U.S. troops are in harm's way there. That's important to point out, but doesn't substitute for a substantive discussion of how many troops should be there, for how long, to do what, etc.

Here's precisely what Romney said to the Legion on Afghanistan: "Of course, we are still at war in Afghanistan. We still have uniformed men and women in conflict, risking their lives just as you once did. How deeply we appreciate their sacrifice. We salute them. We honor them. We respect and love them."

Romney's speech to the Legion did contain some specifics, just not about Afghanistan. Mostly they were in the spending area: rejecting "reckless defense cuts" including the half-trillion-dollar sequestration of defense funds that could begin soon if Congress and the White House can't agree on a deficit-reduction package, and pledging not to cut the Veterans Administration or increase fees for the military health care program known as Tricare.

In other fora, Romney has offered some substantive comments on Afghanistan but none of it amounts to a clear path forward. The discussion of the issue on his campaign website faults President Barack Obama for setting a public timetable to wind down the war, but doesn't say whether that timetable is correct, too fast or too slow. The GOP nominee suggests he'd be more "resolute" but doesn't give any indication of how, beyond deferring to military commanders and "conditions on the ground." There's also a vague promise of a policy review, which sounds a lot like the one Obama conducted at the end of his first-year in office.

Last weekend, I (here and here) called out Obama for campaign-trail exaggerations of his Afghanistan policy after he used a couple of speeches to suggest he was proposing a full withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan by 2014 when, in fact, he has not. The White House dismissed those reports as "profoundly unsophisticated reporting." However, Obama subsequently reverted to more accurate descriptions of his policy.

While Obama talks about having a plan and being "specific," his policy still has a substantial amount of wiggle room in it. The pace of troop withdrawals between now and 2014 has not been established yet. Nor has the size of the U.S. force that will stay on. And there are signs that even the modest goals the U.S. has set to allow for withdrawal may be slipping behind schedule.

However, Obama's prescription for Afghanistan is a model of clarity compared to Romney's. The GOP nominee's comments in this latest interview have failed to refine his position at all and are simply calling attention to the all-things-to-all-people quality to his current stance on the protracted U.S. war in South Asia.