‘Is he confusing them?’: Biden appears to have mixed up Iraq and Afghanistan in debate

“When you were vice president, President Obama turned to you to bring the troops home from Iraq,” Muir continued. “You have said on the campaign trail, quote, ‘I made sure the president turned to me and said, Joe, get our combat troops out of Iraq.’ There was a major drawdown of U.S. troops, and then ISIS seized by some estimates 40% of the territory in Iraq. You then had to send thousands of troops back in. Was it wrong to pull out of Iraq that quickly? And did the move actually help ISIS take hold?”

Biden responded, “No, it wasn’t wrong to pull out. But I want to answer your Afghanistan question. I’ve been in and out of Afghanistan, not with a gun, and I admire my friend [Pete Buttigieg] for his service. But I’ve been out of Afghanistan I think more than anybody on this — and it’s an open secret, you reported a long time ago, George [Stephanopoulos], that I was opposed to the surge in Afghanistan.”

This was an accurate reference to Biden’s opposition to Obama’s 2009 decision to send 40,000 extra troops into Afghanistan.

But Biden then seemed to become confused and veered into incoherence. “The whole purpose of going to Afghanistan was to not have a counterinsurgency, meaning that we’re going to put that country together,” he said. “It cannot be put together. Let me say it again. It will not be put together. It’s three different countries. Pakistan owns the three counties — the three provinces in the east. They’re not any part of — the Haqqanis run it. I will go on and on.”

The Haqqani Network is a Sunni Islamist militant organization affiliated with the Taliban. It is designated by the United States as a foreign terrorist organization that runs primarily out of North Waziristan and Pakistan and conducts cross-border operations into eastern Afghanistan and Kabul.

There are 34 distinct provinces, and splitting up the country has never been proposed during the 18 years since the U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan. There were, however, proposal to split up Iraq into three separate entities based on the Shiite, Sunni, and Kurdish regions of Iraq. Biden himself was an advocate of the idea (which was never taken seriously by either the Bush or Obama administrations) in a 2006 foreign policy op-ed calling for Iraq to be divided.

Steve Saideman, an Afghanistan specialist at Carleton University, told Vox, “When talking about Afghanistan and reaching an agreement, I have never heard anyone refer to three regions. While federalism will probably play a role, the numbers there are around 30 or so for all of the provinces, not three.”

He added, “Biden might have confused Afghanistan with Iraq.”

Biden then turned to his false claim that he turned against the Iraq War on the day it was launched in April 2003. “I said something that was not meant the way I said it. I said — from that point on — what I was argued against in the beginning, once he started to put the troops in, was that in fact we were doing it the wrong way; there was no plan; we should not be engaged; we didn’t have the people with us; we didn’t have our — we didn’t have allies with us, etcetera,” he said.

What Biden didn’t admit was that he was solidly for the war for many months after the invasion and did not make these arguments until things began to go wrong in 2004.

Max Bergmann, former State Department official and a senior fellow at the center-left Center for American Progress, said via Twitter that if rival Elizabeth “Warren gave Biden’s answer on Afghanistan, she would be eviscerated.”

The Afghan-born entrepreneur Saad Mohseni said that “Joe Biden is [in] need of a major lesson in geography – not that he can retain much at his age (and mental state)”

Scott Shadian, a former Bush administration official who advised two U.S. ambassadors to Afghanistan, responded, “He said the exact same thing about Iraq. Is he confusing them?