America’s war in Afghanistan is now in its sixteenth year, the longest foreign war in our history. The phrase “no end in sight” barely covers the situation.

Prospects of victory — if victory is defined as eliminating that country as a haven for Islamist terrorists while creating a representative government in Kabul — are arguably more tenuous today than at any point since the US military invaded in 2001 and routed the Taliban. Such “progress” has, over the years, invariably proven “fragile” and “reversible,” to use the weasel words of General David Petraeus who oversaw the Afghan “surge” of 2010-2011 under President Obama. To cite just one recent data point: the Taliban now controls 15 percent more territory than it did in 2015.

That statistic came up in recent Senate testimony by the US commanding general in Afghanistan, John “Mick” Nicholson Jr, who is (to give no-end-in-sight further context) the twelfth US commander since the war began. Appearing before the Senate Armed Services Committee, he called for several thousand more US troops to break what he optimistically described as a “stalemate.” Those troops would, he added, serve mainly as advisers and trainers to Afghan forces, facilitating what he labeled “hold-fight-disrupt” operations.