Trump surrogate suggests President Obama started the war in Afghanistan

Katrina Pierson
(Image credit: Carolyn Kaster/Associated Press)

Donald Trump spokeswoman Katrina Pierson suggested Saturday that President Obama and then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton started the war in Afghanistan circa 2009. When Obama came into office, she said, "remember we weren't even in Afghanistan by this time. Barack Obama went into Afghanistan creating another problem."

Pierson's bare contention that Afghanistan is "Obama's war" is itself reasonable: Obama said during his 2008 campaign that Afghanistan, in contrast to Iraq, was "the right battlefield" and the fight that "has to be won." However, the war at that point was already seven years old, as it was of course started by President George W. Bush shortly after the 9/11 attacks in 2001.

Watch Pierson's full comments below. Bonnie Kristian

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Bonnie Kristian

Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.