US President Joe Biden emerged from three days of hiding this week to clear up a misunderstanding that had arisen in the preceding 20 years. He announced to a bemused world, and to millions of terrified Afghans, that from now on, Afghanistan was on its own. The US hadn’t spent 20 years rearranging the geology of the countryside, he offered by way of explanation, because it was trying to do nation-building à la Iraq in a country known as the “graveyard of empires”. Read my lips: no nation-building here, build your own bloody nation!..