Defense Secretary Jim Mattis testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee today.

"We are not winning in Afghanistan right now. And we will correct this as soon as possible," Mattis said in testimony to the Senate Armed Services Committee. Mattis acknowledged that he believed the Taliban were "surging" at the moment, something he said he intended to address.

When you aren't winning, you are losing.
2,300 boys have died in Afghanistan so far. Many more will die if Mattis gets his way.

The Afghan government was assessed by the U.S. military to control or influence just 59.7 percent of Afghanistan's 407 districts as of Feb. 20, a nearly 11 percentage-point decrease from the same time in 2016, according to data released by the U.S. Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction.
...In the first eight months of 2016, Afghan forces suffered 15,000 casualties including more than 5,000 killed.
Civilian deaths are also at record highs, according to the U.N. Assistance Mission to Afghanistan, which began tracking the deaths in 2009.

Obviously the solution is an Afghan Surge, because no one has ever thought of that before.
Not the British. Not the Soviets. And certainly not Obama.

Barack Obama will end months of uncertainty over his Afghanistan policy when he announces tonight that he is to deploy 30,000 troops from the marines and army, in a last-ditch attempt to prevent the war being lost.

It looks like Trump will dig another last ditch.

In a rare bit of actual journalism from the Washington Post, they summed up the situation with The U.S. will never win the war in Afghanistan.

The war has now cost us over $1 trillion, making it the second-costliest U.S. war, after World War II. In fiscal year 2017, the war will cost about $50 billion, nearly a billion every week. We’ve lost over 2,350 soldiers, with 20,000 more suffering injuries. And as Trevor Timm of the Guardian noted, in a couple of years, there will be soldiers fighting in Afghanistan that weren’t even born at the time of 9/11.
We’re no longer fighting to defeat an enemy; we’re engaged in “nation-building.” Good luck with that....It remains one of the poorest nations in the world, despite more than $117 billion in U.S. development appropriations since 2002...Despite the aid and the opium profits, Afghanistan is still near the bottom of multiple categories in the United Nations’ Human Development Index, ranging from infant mortality to life expectancy, per capita income and more.
The United States is pouring money into a corrupt sewer. The World Justice Project’s 2016 Rule of Law Index ranked Afghanistan 111 of 113 countries assessed...
We are asking our military to build a nation on the other side of the world, dispatching soldiers who don’t know the language, the culture, the religion, the ethnic and sectarian divisions or the history. The one thing that may unify Afghanistan’s tribes is their pride in their independence. Afghanistan is known as the “graveyard of empires.”

You couldn't ask for a more hopeless situation.
Well, you could include one more element.

A new United Nations survey says the total area under opium poppy cultivation in Afghanistan has increased by 10 percent, from 183,000 to 201,000 hectares, compared to the previous year, leading to a significant rise in the production of illicit opium.
The report by the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) says potential opium production was up 43 percent, reaching 4,800 tons in 2016.
“The cultivation provided labor for an estimated 235,100 full-time jobs in 2016, and the sales of opium poppy and derivatives constituted the main source of income of opium poppy farmers, accounting for up to 57 percent of the annual household income,” according to the UNODC.

We did this.