The war in Afghanistan is lost

Time to admit it: The war in Afghanistan is lost: 

In 2009, President Obama announced he was going to try his hand at George W. Bush's "surge" idea, this time in Afghanistan, boosting the U.S. troop presence there by 30,000 for 18 months. For the same reasons the surge basically didn't work in Iraq, it didn't work in Afghanistan either, only even more so. (It did, however, get a lot of American soldiers and Afghan civilians killed or wounded.) At this point, nearly two entire presidencies have been spent trying to build some kind of competent democratic state in that country.