Former US Vice President Joseph R. Biden said Thursday during a presidential debate that he fought within the Obama administration against surging troops to Afghanistan, saying it was a mistake to allocate forces to a conflict that the United States could not win.
Biden was challenged at the Democratic debate over a Washington Post article that reported the military misled the pubic over the war, publicly saying it was going well while internal reports suggested otherwise.
“I’m the guy from the beginning who argued that it was a big, big mistake to surge forces to Afghanistan,” Biden said, “I argued against it constantly.”
Other accounts of the Obama administration’s approach to the war have noted Biden’s opposition to the counter-insurgency doctrine, or COIN, championed by General Petraeus and others in Afghanistan and Iraq, in favor of a more limited counter-terrorism mission.
