[Music, Black Eyed Peas, "meet Me Halfway") Nguyen:] Love that song. "Halfway" [sic] by the Black Eyed Peas. Well, politicians often say one thing on the campaign trail and do another after they've been elected to office.
[Holmes:] No!
[Nguyen:] Sometimes it happens, believe it or not.
[Holmes:] Just a couple times in history. Well so has President Obama is he keeping his campaign promises on Afghanistan? Josh Levs looks at whether his actions match his words.
[Barack Obama, President Of The United States Of America:] We definitely are going to need a couple of additional brigades.
[Obama:] We need more troops. We need more resources there. Part of the reason I think it's so important for us to end the war in Iraq is to be able to get more troops into Afghanistan.
[Levs:] More troops. More troops. We wanted to see how specific he got, what specific promises he made and whether he's keeping them. And one of the places in the world to look at this is this is right here, the Obameter. It's from PolitiFact.com, where they keep track of hundreds of promises he made on the campaign trail. Joining us from PolitiFact in fact, from the Obameter, Angie Holan, who's been following the president's Afghanistan promises. Hey there, Angie.
[Angie Holan, Politifact.com:] Thanks for having me, Josh.
[Levs:] All right. Let's do this this is what I want to do. I want to start off with a sound byte in which the president made a very specific promise about Afghanistan. And we'll then you'll tell us if if he fulfilled that or not. Here's the sound byte.
[Obama:] As president, I will deploy at least two additional brigades to Afghanistan to reinforce our counterterrorism operations and support NATO's efforts against the Taliban.
[Levs:] Angie, the Obameter says?
[Holan:] The Obameter says "promise kept." This happened earlier this year, when Obama made a major speech and ordered those extra brigades, and they did go over. So we rated it "promise kept."
[Levs:] The the next one I found really interesting, because you talk about NATO. And here you don't exactly say the president has fulfilled this promise yet. Talk to us about that one.
[Holan:] The NATO promise is to lift restrictions on NATO troops. These are troops that belong to other countries, our allies. And there have either been restrictions or reluctance to send additional troops. Now, we've rated this "in the works," because the Obama administration is making efforts on this. There have been a lot of diplomatic efforts, and other countries have said that that they're open. So this one is "in the works," not...
[Levs:] "In the works" from you guys means that you've seen him take some steps toward fulfilling it. He hasn't done it yet, but you think he's done enough that he's going in the direction of actually fulfilling it.
[Holan:] That's right. We have "in the works," and then we have our other ratings when he actually gets to fulfillment, like "promise kept" or "promise broken."
[Levs:] OK. Yes, we got about a minute here. Let's zoom zoom in here. I want to show everyone really quickly, we're going to scroll through these. You can see you guys have a total of five. These are the next two. You have "train and equipping the Afghan army" and "increasing non-military aid to Afghanistan by a billion dollars." Now, in each case there, you're saying the same thing. You're saying it's "in the works" because he's taken some steps toward fulfilling these two, right?
[Holan:] That's right.
[Levs:] OK.
[Holan:] The the aid is still pending in Congress.
[Levs:] Right.
[Holan:] So he has to wait for them on that.
[Levs:] But he's working toward. Now, I want to end with this last one. We have a screen for you on this. "Making U.S. military aid to Pakistan conditional on anti-terror efforts." The Taliban has at times used Pakistan to launch attacks in Afghanistan. The president made a promise. How's he doing?
[Holan:] That's right. The administration often talks about Afghanistan and Pakistan as being part of the same issue. We rated this one "promise kept." Congress passed the the aid to Pakistan, and there are a process for the secretary of state to verify that there are helping fight terror terrorism in the those border regions.
[Levs:] Yes. You know, thanks for that. I keep a close eye on the Obameter. Two for five so far on the Afghanistan front. None broken. As the president goes, that's not too bad, right?
[Holan:] That's not so bad. We've got three more years to go, just about.
[Levs:] And I'm
[Holan:] Thanks.
[Nguyen:] Well, a store owner who gave a robber a second chance.
[Holmes:] Yes, now hearing from the suspect months later. This is an extraordinary twist...
[Nguyen:] Yes.
[Holmes:] ...to an already pretty strange story about crime, punishment and forgiveness.