Think, sadly, again, and think, too, of the blood and treasure lost in that miserable, desperate country since 2001: Almost 2,300 American lives, and more than $1tn (€848bn) spent on America’s military operations, including $100bn on so-called nation-building.

The UK, too, has paid a price — 456 lives lost and many more wrecked by serious injuries — for its participation in what was known more than somewhat optimistically as Operation Enduring Freedom.

Britain’s losses in Afghanistan were greater than those taken in Iraq and the Falklands war.

There is in Afghanistan now markedly more freedom, thanks to the West’s military effort, than were was when the country was in the hands of the Taliban and providing the safe haven in which Al-Qaeda could plan its 9-11 attacks.

But by no stretch of the imagination can we be sure it will endure.

Estimates of who controls what and where vary, as does the intensity and nature of attacks by insurgents.

The most conservative assessment puts the Taliban in control of 15% to 20% of the country’s districts, while IS, which has a malicious presence in more than 30, strikes anywhere it can.

The Taliban generally targets people — army and police personnel — and places associated with the country’s government but, as can be expected, IS has no red lines: Its terrorist attacks murder civilians and, increasingly, Shia Muslims.

What is to be done, as the number of civilian casualties so far this year approaches the record-high levels reported during the same period in the past two years?

The government’s expensively-trained army suffers from low morale and the police force — also trained at great cost by Western governments — remains crippled by endemic corruption.

The country’s only thriving industry is the re-invigorated opium crop that funds the insurgents.

America’s answer, which will not be popular in the heartlands that put Mr Trump into the White House, is to increase its military presence and to ask its Nato allies to join it sending more soldiers.

That’s a request to which the British government — if not British voters — will respond positively, along with the familiar but unconvincing assurance that the mission will be about training, not combat.

Mission creep? Never heard of it!

The stage is set, then, for another round of The Great Game — the name given to Britain’s 19th century strategy for preventing other European powers, chiefly France and Russia, profiting from political collapse in Islamic Asia — goes on.

Some of the players on the field are new, others have left.

But there’s not the slightest signal suggesting that more Western boots — yet again — on the ground will succeed where, demonstrably, Operation Enduring Freedom failed.