This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Friday, September 24, 2010. I'm Kayla Brown.

A new book by Bob Woodruff reveals many of the disconnects between the president and the Pentagon on how to pursue war in Afghanistan

But the divisions are symptomatic of the disconnect between what we want to achieve in Afghanistan and the facts on the ground.

That according to Malu innocent foreign policy analysts at the Cato Institute and

co-author of the report escaping the graveyard of empires.

What do we know now that we didn't know two weeks ago about the Obama administration in dealing

with the war in Afghanistan?

Nothing too much is new from the Woodward book.

As far as I can tell tell we knew that there was some

vigorous debate in the White House last year about the formation of strategy.

I think sort of what's telling is that the White House has been unable to

contain the rancor from getting out into the public

domain and into the public discourse.

And I think a lot of that rancor is symptomatic of the deeper problems we have with the current

strategy and the mismatch between what we want to achieve in Afghanistan

and the resources available to achieve those goals.

The first being I think the profound problems we have with President Hamid Karzai. The lack of a legitimate host nation

government in Kabul is extremely difficult to sort of work with when we were talking

about trying to promote an accountable, effective, capable government that is able to provide the basic goods and services

to its people.

We're talking about basic security and justice.

The Taliban is able to provide and not the government that we're backing is able to provide.

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