‘Our mission in Afghanistan was never supposed to have been nation building.’
President Biden stressed the purpose behind the US intervention in Afghanistan had “always been preventing a terrorist attack on American homeland” and “never supposed to be creating a unified centralised democracy”.
This clearly contradicts his previous positions on the US objective in Afghanistan.
At the outset of the conflict in 2001 when Mr Biden was a US senator, he outlined the long-term purpose of the American military intervention, saying: “Our hope is that we will see a relatively stable government in Afghanistan, one that… provides the foundation for future reconstruction of that country.”
And again, in 2003 – in another quote, tracked down by the Politico website – he said the “alternative to nation building is chaos, a chaos that churns out bloodthirsty warlords, drug traffickers and terrorists”.
Senility in action.
