You’ll never guess what’s happening in Afghanistan.

The international troops are set to go, if not gone

Bagram airbase got quietly handed back over the weekend, and as that happened, yes, you guessed it, and the Taliban have entered two provincial capitals in the north.

The trouble with that is those left behind, i.e. the Afghan troops, no longer have the combat support to do much about it.

So the question is: how long before the Taliban take over?

It’s a weird old thing American foreign policy. They never seem to learn and they never seem to understand.

Bush went in of course all guns blazing, but got distracted by Iraq and got stretched a bit thin.

If you want to go back further, it was of course the Americans that handed the Taliban the weaponry in the first place to deal to the Russians.

But the important point is that it was always going to end up this way, because the Taliban, like so many localised groups in various global trouble spots, take a completely different view to conflict and invasion than Americans or western countries do.

Americans like to invade on Sunday and have it wrapped up by Wednesday, but the Taliban are in it for the long haul.

Americans, one way or another, one presidency or another, were always going to run out of puff.

Obama saw too many body bags; Trump wasn’t into other people’s problems.

And so it was over. Biden didn’t want to answer questions on it; he only wanted to talk about, quote unquote, happy things.

We got dragged in as well, such are the perils and pitfalls of alliances, so it’s a fair question to ask as to whether our presence there did anything at all or we just wasted a lot of time and money on a fruitless cause.

The counter argument will be democracy has arrived, but that’s a version of democracy is not sure any of us really wants or would recognise, and despite the fact the locals are supposed to have been trained up to support themselves, no one ever really believed that. Didn’t believe it in Iraq, don’t believe it here.

So a couple of northern capitals this week, and the Taliban once again are on the move. 20 years for what? Who saw that coming apart from everyone except, yet again, the Americans?