This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Tuesday, February 6, 2018. I'm Caleb Brown.

When the US military kills insurgents or terrorists overseas, why does it seem like we end up with more of the same problem?

The Cato Institute's Eric Gopner discusses the miscalculations in Iraq, Afghanistan, and beyond.

Is there a standard way to measure what is an insurgent, what is a terrorist, or who is an insurgent what is a terrorist or who is an enemy combatant?

Great question I don't know of a universally agreed to definition

organizations out of Stanford like mapping militant organizations take a stab at it, but I couldn't

explain fully their methodology.

Okay, so what kind of estimates do we have out there about how many Islamist terrorists exist?

When we, or just before the war on terror, there were an estimated 13 groups, Al-Qaeda,

plus 12 like-minded groups, if you will, averaging about 32,000

total fighters was the estimate.

And now we're looking at approximately 44 terror organizations, Al-Qaeda, Islamic State, similar groups.

And the estimates are approximately 109,000 fighters or adherence to those groups groups despite the fact that the

US government estimates that it's killed as many as 60,000 fighters over the last

two years. Okay, so as you as you note in your post here at Cato.org when does 32,200 minus 60,000 equal 109,000?

Correct.

That's, so how do we, how do we get that?

How does that math add up?

General McChrystal is the first that I heard or saw who talked about this and he delivered

a speech back in 2009 and then I served in Afghanistan in 2010 and heard more of what we called

McChrystal math but others will call coin mathematics or insurgent math.

And his argument was that there's nothing linear

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