This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Thursday, September 28th, 2017.

I'm Caleb Brown. Recent comments from Defense Secretary Mattis indicate that if the U.S US has a strategy in Afghanistan

that strategy doesn't have any metrics for success attached to it. What does that

mean if not ever more prolonged war in Afghanistan.

Cato's Chris Preble comments.

This is from a release from the US Department of Defense. Yeah, it was a press availability on the plane, right.

Yeah. Yeah.

So the question was, what are some of the metrics for your success in Afghanistan?

And Secretary Mattis responds, I'm not prepared to give those yet because I need to get

to Afghanistan. I need to sit down in Brussels with the other nations and talk with them together about what the metrics are and make certain that

we all put our heads together on this. So once I have that, I'll get very specific.

It seems, don't we already have a strategy for Afghanistan?

No, I think that these remarks, very candid, unscripted remarks by Secretary Mattis prove rather decisively that

we don't actually have a strategy in Afghanistan.

We have, we have, again, there's a difference between goals or aspirations or

desired end states. Those have all been stated. but the actual strategy for getting from here to there is unclear.

Is it possible that the United States has a strategy with respect to Afghanistan that simply

doesn't involve the war coming to an end and so metrics aren't all that

important. I think so. I mean I think that if you read through not merely the president speech last month but also sort of the commentary surrounding the speech. What ostensibly differentiated President Trump's

approach to Afghanistan from President Obama's in particular but to a certain

extent also President Bush's is that there is no end state.

There is no time limit for the number of truth for how long troops will remain in Afghanistan,

...