Trump Spokesperson Says Obama Invaded Afghanistan. He Didn't.

A spokesperson for Donald Trump ’s presidential campaign has blamed President Barack Obama  for invading Afghanistan a foreign policy decision he never made.

“Remember, we weren’t even in Afghanistan by this time,” Katrina Pierson told CNN early Saturday. “Barack Obama went into Afghanistan creating another problem.”

“That was Obama’s war,” she declared later in the program, when asked to clarify if she meant Obama was responsible for its launch.

In fact, the invasion of Afghanistan took place in 2001 after the attacks on Sept. 11 of that year. Obama was a state senator in Illinois at the time, moonlighting as a restaurant critic.  Being president was nothing but a dream for him back then.

When he did end up in the White House in 2009, the war in Afghanistan was still going on. And Obama made ramping up U.S. presence there a central plank of his foreign policy platform during his presidential campaign. Too many resources had been spent on Iraq, he repeatedly argued, and not enough on the country from which al Qaeda actually planned the attacks.

Pierson most likely mistook Obama’s announced surge in December 2009   the outgrowth of his campaign policy as an actual invasion. But it wasn’t. 

There is good reason to conclude that the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan and subsequent war created a real mess. Obama will leave office  with American troops still there. But there is also a reason it is widely described as America’s longest war . It’s because it started in 2001. Not, as Pierson implied, 2009.  

Editor’s note: Donald Trump regularly incites political violence  and is a serial liar , rampant xenophobe , racist , misogynist  and birther  who has repeatedly pledged to ban all Muslims 1.6 billion members of an entire religion from entering the U.S.

CORRECTION: Due to an editing error, this story incorrectly stated that President Obama entered the White House in 2008.