AMERICA’S LONGEST WAR: America’s war in Afghanistan is now Trump’s increasingly bloody problem. Is it time to declare defeat? “Thus far three U.S. presidents, six secretaries of defense and five chairmen of the Joint Chiefs of Staff have presided over a war in which no one has been able to define victory, let alone remotely succeed in winning. The Soviets tried the same decades ago, with equally catastrophic results.”

Comparing our endeavor to the Soviet’s is a bit silly — their Afghanistan war exposed the fragility of the Communist state and helped to bring it down. We’re in no such danger. But there’s nothing we can realistically hope to achieve there that we can’t do with a radically smaller footprint on the ground, following our anti-ISIS model in eastern Syria and western Iraq.