When is a timescale not a deadline? When you're a politician talking about pulling troops out of Afghanistan. When they held talks in Canada last weekend, David Cameron and Barack Obama realised they had something in common: the need to reassure their domestic audience that the commitment to maintaining forces in Afghanistan is not open-ended.
Mr Cameron did not mean to create a flurry of excitement by telling Sky TV at the G8 summit: "Make no mistake, we cannot be there for another five years." To him, it was a statement of the obvious, and he had said it before the May election. A lesson was learnt: saying something as PM carries a lot more weight than as leader of the opposition.
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