Biden's two-step on 'nation-building' in Afghanistan Defending the U.S. military exit from Afghanistan, President Biden said in an interview with ABC News that he never understood why nation-building became a foreign-policy objective. "We went there for two reasons," Biden said. "One, to get Bin Laden, and two, to wipe out as best we could, and we did, the al-Qaeda in Afghanistan. We did it. Then what happened? ... We decided to engage in nation-building. In nation-building. That never made any sense to me." The Fact Checker's Glenn Kessler was a diplomatic correspondent for almost a decade after the Sept. 11 attacks. The George W. Bush administration initially wanted to have only a light footprint in Afghanistan after the Taliban was toppled. Members of Congress, including Biden at the time, pushed officials to invest more in reconstruction and democracy-building. For example, on Oct. 8, 2001, in an interview on CBS News, Biden was asked, "Should we be in the business of nation-building?" He responded, "Absolutely, along with the rest of the world." At a Senate hearing in 2003, Biden said: "In some parts of this administration, 'nation-building' is a dirty phrase. But the alternative to nation-building is chaos — a chaos that churns out bloodthirsty warlords, drug-traffickers and terrorists. We've seen it happen in Afghanistan before — and we're watching it happen in Afghanistan today." Biden helped push through legislation and funding to build up Afghan institutions and, until 2008, kept complaining Bush was not taking reconstruction seriously enough. But he became a more vocal skeptic when President Barack Obama doubled down on Bush's counterinsurgency policy at the beginning of his term. By that point, Biden, then the vice president, famously became the in-house skeptic of the war. The definition of "nation-building" is subject to some debate, but it was Biden himself who kept using the term in the early years of the war. He earned Two Pinocchios. Enjoy this newsletter? Forward it to someone else who'd like it! If this email was forwarded to you, sign up here. Did you hear something fact-checkable? Send it here; we'll check it out. Crime doesn't pay in the Va. governor's race In TV ads, tweets and online videos, Glenn Youngkin, the Republican nominee for Virginia governor, is trying to paint former governor Terry McAuliffe as a soft-on-crime Democrat who presided over a crime spike from 2014 through 2017. McAuliffe, who was governor during that period, is seeking the office again this year as the Democratic nominee. "During McAuliffe's tenure as governor, the murder rate went up 43 percent and the rape rate went up every year," Youngkin says in one YouTube video. "No wonder the murder rate went up 43 percent when McAuliffe was governor," a narrator says in one of Youngkin's television spots. Both of Youngkin's claims are technically accurate but missing context, showing how a carefully scripted talking point can distort the overall crime situation in a state. When looking at all classes of violent crimes — homicide, rape, robbery and aggravated assault — Virginia was one of the five safest states in the country during McAuliffe's governorship and the safest large state (Maine, Vermont and New Hampshire had lower crime rates). In fact, Virginia's violent crime rate was about half the rate for the entire United States. For obscuring half the picture, Youngkin earned Two Pinocchios. We're always looking for fact-check suggestions. You can reach us via email, Twitter (@GlennKesslerWP, @rizzoTK, @AdriUsero) or Facebook. Read about our process and rating scale here, and sign up for the newsletter here. Scroll down for this week's Pinocchio roundup. | 
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