ROGER SIMON: After Bolton, Should Trump Be Talking to Despots?

But what to do about Afghanistan?  Trump wants to leave but Bolton wants to stay.  To be honest, fifteen years ago I would have agreed with Bolton – and so would have many of you, I wager.  And most of our political establishment, right and left, would have too. In fact, they did. Remember “Democracy, whiskey, sexy”?  How we would turn Iraq into Denmark…

But for quite a while now most of us have learned otherwise.  Horrid as Afghanistan may be — and a culture much of which still treats women like chattel and young boys like concubines in 2019, not to mention subsisting on the production of opium poppies, is pretty horrid indeed — there is little we can do about it.  Enough of our young people have been killed or wounded, enough of our treasure spent.  Basta!  Let’s get out, intelligently obviously (i. e. not like Vietnam).

Read the whole thing.