Biden recalled visiting Afghanistan while he was vice president-elect. He met with then–U.S. commander David McKiernan, who said they had not seen Al Qaeda in 18 months. Biden said he then asked Secretary of Defense Gates, “Let me ask you a simple question. If there were no Al Qaeda, would we be spending 100 plus billion dollars sending tens of thousands of men and women to Afghanistan? The response was ‘yes.’ That was a crystallizing moment.”
