We will need to remind ourselves often in the next few years that the situation in Afghanistan and Pakistan is not the Obama administration’s fault. It inherited from George W. Bush a crisis so deep and so horribly complex that dealing with it would tax the powers of St Peter, let alone a US government with many other things on its mind and on its grossly overstrained budget. Improving the situation is the best that we can hope for. Finding a “solution” to the Afghan war and its repercussions in Pakistan is not even a possibility.

On Afghanistan itself, the administration’s new strategy, set out last week, strikes most of the right notes. In particular, it is correct to emphasise the critical importance of building up the Afghan National Army, without which nothing can be achieved in Afghanistan in the long term; and on the need for the US to work towards an exit strategy rather than engage in empty rhetoric about “staying the course”. Talk of creating a modern, western-style democracy in Afghanistan has been drastically scaled back.