This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Friday, April 10th, 2009.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Adapting a surge strategy from Iraq to Afghanistan requires adapting to a dramatically different physical terrain, a much weaker

central government, largely imaginary border between Afghanistan and Pakistan and a NATO

alliance that is hanging by a threat.

Other than that, says Cato Institute Legal Policy analyst and former Special Forces officer

David Ritgers, it's a fair comparison.

Well, they're very dissimilar in terms of the factors that made the surge a success in Iraq.

Economically, the Sunni areas are resource poor. There is oil north in the Kurdish areas and there's oil south in the Shiite areas, but there's no oil in the Sunni areas.

So you can rent loyalty very cheaply in the Sunni areas.

In Afghanistan, the reverse is true.

The areas just around Kandahar and the Helmon and Orrskine provinces, which is where a lot of the Taliban heartland is, are also the areas where

opium poppy grows and very successfully.

So that's actually a resource-rich area. So renting loyalty and porting the

third strategy with sons of Afghanistan parallel to sons of Iraq

is very, it's a very stretching the economics of that to the breaking point.

Second, let's take a look at how the terrain is in Iraq versus Afghanistan and where the population is in that terrain.

In Iraq there's two major rivers, the Tigers and the Euphrates and the population is concentrated around those two rivers.

So you can mass your forces

and achieve a localized ratio of counterinsurgents to population that is successful.

And in Baghdad we had dozens of combat outposts that were within

small arms range of each other and could mutually reinforce one another.

...