The Candidates on Afghanistan

In the October 22, 2012 debate moderator Bob Schieffer asked – what do you do when the Afghanistan deadline comes and they are unable to take over responsibility? Mitt Romney said – he’ll bring troops home because the training schedule is on track and the Afghanis are ready to step in; we’ll look at what’s happening in Pakistan because it impacts Afghanistan; he went on about why Pakistan is important – saying we need to be more helpful in Pakistan getting a more stable government and that our aid to them has to be conditioned upon them meeting certain benchmarks.

President Obama went into what we’ve done in Afghanistan; said the coalition and US troops will pull out responsibly and the Afghans are ready; Obama then went back to his approach allowing us to rebuild our economy and getting our veterans the care they need along with changing the process for certifications they need to get jobs – he gave the example of a medic wanting to be a nurse and having to start from scratch with certification when the experience the veteran had was more than what a nurse here would have done; he said the First Lady has done great work with Joining Forces and the unemployment rate of veterans is lower than that of the general population instead of being higher as it was when he came into office.

Both implied that the troops would be coming home with the end of 2014 – this is a turnaround for Romney. Since the question had nothing to do with Pakistan – I won’t address it. I checked out what the President said and darn – true again. The certification process needs to change. Per the Labor Department in March 2009 the veteran jobless rate was 11.2% for those 18 and older (it rose 4% in the past year) and the corresponding rate for non-veterans in the same age group was 8.8%. Per the Bureau of Labor Statistics the August 2012 veteran unemployment data showed a 6.6% rate for all veterans, the lowest rate in more than 3 years, and the national unemployment rate was 8.1%.