President Obama seemed to rewrite history in his remarks on Friday in Strasbourg, France, telling an audience at a town hall event:
Obama, April 3: But after the initial NATO engagement in Afghanistan, we got sidetracked by Iraq, and we have not fully recovered that initial insight that we have a mutual interest in ensuring that organizations like al Qaeda cannot operate.
But NATO didn’t have a mission in Afghanistan until Aug. 11, 2003, several months after the U.S.