From the everlasting fountain of bad ideas that is the Washington establishment now comes another one: turn Ukraine into an Iraq- or Afghanistan-style quagmire for Russia.

This idea has been floating around national security circles for a while. But with Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine, it’s become explicit. Hillary Clinton pointed to the Soviet quagmire in 1980s Afghanistan, where there were “a lot of countries supplying arms and advice and even some advisors to those who were recruited to fight Russia,” adding that it was “the model that people are now looking toward.” Both experts and the Biden administration and its allies are now predicting this very thing, with Biden having explored and planned for the idea since late last year, and US and European officials now reportedly discussing it. Biden’s somewhat cryptic allusion in his State of the Union address to Russian president Vladimir Putin having to “pay a continuing high price over the long run” hints at such plans.

In other words, it seems more than likely that this — Washington and other NATO governments supporting a long-term Ukrainian insurgency that will do to Russia what twenty years in Afghanistan did to the United States — is shaping up as the most likely endgame for all this. It’s also an unbelievably awful idea.