This past June, during one of the Senate Armed Services Committee’s regular oversight hearings, Defense Secretary Jim Mattis made a blunt assessment about the war in Afghanistan: the U.S. and its partners in the Afghan government were not winning.

In fact, the conflict has been at a stalemate for such a long period of time that the Trump administration recognized that a strategy review was desperately needed. Tonight, America will finally be given a plan from the White House––one that will either prolong the status quo or finally realize that the strength of weakness of America’s counterterrorism policy doesn’t depend on Afghanistan’s political stability.