This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, February 29th, 2012.

I'm Caleb Brown. It didn't begin with burning Qurans, the trust between Afghan governors security forces and American

occupiers has been diminishing for a long while but the price of that mistrust is now becoming

more clear US commanders pulled military personnel from Afghan

government ministries. U.S. soldiers working with Afghans have been instructed to

keep their distance. NATO, Britain, and France have pulled coordinators.

On Sunday, demonstrators hurled grenades at a small U.S. base in northern Afghanistan.

On Monday, a suicide bomber rammed his vehicle into the gates of a NATO base and airfield

in eastern Afghanistan, killing nine people.

Despite all this, there are renewed calls to stay the course in Afghanistan.

Malu innocent foreign policy analyst at the Cato Institute says for these and other reasons, it's time to leave

Afghanistan.

If you read news reports, they indicate that look because of this burning of

kurans, whether intentional or not, because it has occurred,

it has inflamed tensions, and therefore it has

complicated the withdrawal from Afghanistan, which if somebody follows what

Malu Innocent has written, it wouldn't necessarily complicate a withdrawal. it would make withdrawal more clearly the choice to make.

Right, I think that a lot of people who are saying that this complicates the mission, it complicates

the mission if the mission is to stay indefinitely.

And certainly that's what many people either in the White House or the Pentagon

would want because the gains have been so extremely tenuous, whether that's the increase in

the civilian casualties over the past five years as the UN has found, whether that's

...