“The President has framed the war’s end with the upcoming September 11th anniversary, for obvious reasons, but it strikes a hollow ring of political marketing at a moment that ought to evoke sombre reflection about the tragic cost of hubris—the more than twenty-two hundred American lives lost, but also, crucially, more than a hundred thousand Afghans killed. It is the Afghan people, of course, who have paid the highest price for America’s failed ambitions in their country, and who now face the bleak threat of a second Taliban revolution, or a deepening and grinding civil war, and this after more than forty years of almost continuous conflict, started and prolonged by the invasions and covert actions of outside nations.” The excellent Steve Coll in The New Yorker with a short summary of America’s Longest War.