Addressing the subject of Afghanistan this week, President Donald Trump said that he’d like “to find out why we’ve been there for 17 years, how it’s going, and what we should do in terms of additional ideas.” These are all good questions, though if he really wanted to know, at any point over the past six months he could have called any of the hundreds of officers and intelligence analysts at his disposal—or the many outside experts who, regardless of their politics, couldn’t resist an invitation to brief the commander in chief.