This is a really cost-free shot by the former vice president. The U.S. surged in Afghanistan and cleared most of the country’s territory of Taliban control. The Taliban retreated to its redoubts in Pakistan. We built, at enormous expense of time and energy, a NATO-equipped and -trained Afghan national army to hold the Taliban back. They couldn’t. And increasingly, we couldn’t. Public opinion put limits on what our statesmen could promise and what our military could do. “Finishing the job” in Afghanistan really would have required something like a major incursion, or potentially regime change in the far more explosive Pakistan, a nuclear power. What I find so indefensible about Pence’s comments is that he knows better but is free riding on the ignorance. This tough talk issued after the fact is so cheap it devalues the currency of language itself.