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Biden reflects on Iraq, Afghanistan 12/13/11 7:32 PM EST
Vice President Joe Biden appeared on MSNBC's Rachel Maddow Show Tuesday to reflect on the lessons learned from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
In remarks released in advance by the network, Biden said that nation building exercises could be successful but were costly and possibly unnecessary.
"I think one of the lessons we've learned is you can go into an-- America is so powerful, has such an incredible military capability, that you can go to-- into any dictatorship and you can try to impose ... democracy, but it's gonna take you a trillion dollars and a decade, and you're gonna have to make a judgment whether or not you had better spent your time and effort doing something else to make the world safer than that," Biden told Maddow.
On Afghanistan, Biden sounded an optimistic note that the war could be wound down successfully like the conflict in Iraq.
"It has the potential to be wound down. It's in direct proportion to how wound up the-- Afghan military is, how good they are, how quickly they come online, and how much responsibility the Afghan Government in Kabul is able to exert, politically, in the-- in-- within Afghanistan. For example, the president said that we were gonna withdraw quote "the surge," 33,000 forces by the end of this summer. And he said we would continue to keep apace, that pace. We're not gonna slow this down," the vice president said.
His comments come as the administration touts the withdrawal of all U.S. forces from Iraq as a huge accomplishment -- a move that critics say is premature but that the Obama administration has argued is a campaign promise kept to the American people.
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Vice President Joe Biden appeared on MSNBC's Rachel Maddow Show Tuesday to reflect on the lessons learned from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
In remarks released in advance by the network, Biden said that nation building exercises could be successful but were costly and possibly unnecessary.
"I think one of the lessons we've learned is you can go into an-- America is so powerful, has such an incredible military capability, that you can go to-- into any dictatorship and you can try to impose ... democracy, but it's gonna take you a trillion dollars and a decade, and you're gonna have to make a judgment whether or not you had better spent your time and effort doing something else to make the world safer than that," Biden told Maddow.
On Afghanistan, Biden sounded an optimistic note that the war could be wound down successfully like the conflict in Iraq.
"It has the potential to be wound down. It's in direct proportion to how wound up the-- Afghan military is, how good they are, how quickly they come online, and how much responsibility the Afghan Government in Kabul is able to exert, politically, in the-- in-- within Afghanistan. For example, the president said that we were gonna withdraw quote "the surge," 33,000 forces by the end of this summer. And he said we would continue to keep apace, that pace. We're not gonna slow this down," the vice president said.
His comments come as the administration touts the withdrawal of all U.S. forces from Iraq as a huge accomplishment -- a move that critics say is premature but that the Obama administration has argued is a campaign promise kept to the American people.
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