President Trump is currently playing Hamlet over the fate of Afghanistan. He is divided between repeating the Obama mini-surge and cutting America’s losses in the graveyard of empires.

But the consequences of unilateral withdrawal have not been considered. To borrow from one of Donald Rumsfeld’s 2003 “snowflakes,” will withdrawal help deter or dissuade “more terrorists every day than the madrassas and the radical clerics are recruiting, training, and deploying against us?” Past experience suggests it is unlikely.