Romney, who has won the first two Republican contests in the race to pick a nominee to face Democratic President Barack Obama in November, strongly rejected any sort of talks with the Taliban.
“The right course for America is not to negotiate with the Taliban while the Taliban are killing our soldiers,” Romney said during a debate of the five Republican presidential hopefuls ahead of Saturday’s South Carolina primary.
“The right course is to recognize that they are the enemy of the United States.” Romney said Obama had put the United States in a position of “extraordinary weakness” because he had made a decision based on a political calendar on when to pull US troops out of Afghanistan and because he has even publicly announced the date when the United States would completely withdraw from the country. “We don’t negotiate from a position of weakness as we are pulling our troops out,” Romney said. “We should not negotiate with the Taliban. We should defeat the Taliban.”
Senior US officials told Reuters last month that the United States had been involved in 10 months of secret dialogue with the Taliban. Officials had said the talks had reached a critical juncture and a Taliban prisoner transfer was possible from the Guantanamo Bay military prison into Afghan government custody.
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