During his speech Monday, President Biden said that "our mission in Afghanistan was never supposed to have been nation building."
"I’ve argued for many years that our mission should be narrowly focused on counter terrorism," he added, "not counterinsurgency or nation building."
This was a lie. Biden in fact argued the exact opposite in 2003.
"In some parts of the [Bush] administration, nation building is still a dirty phrase," he told the Senate Armed Services Committee, but the alternative to nation building is chaos, a chaos that churns out bloodthirsty warlords, drug traffickers and terrorists, and we have we’ve seen it happen in Afghanistan before and I am quite fearful it may happen again, notwithstanding your considerable efforts. Warlords, drugs, terrorists — the connection is clear as a bell.
"Terrorists or drug profits — use drug profits to buy safe havens from warlords. That’s pretty much the defined state of Afghanistan through the 90s."