This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Tuesday, August 3rd, 2010. I'm Keila Brown.

President Obama insists that the U.S. Mission in Afghanistan is one of modest goals.

So why the dramatic increase in troop press... Afghanistan is one of modest goals.

So why the dramatic increase in troop presence and why has the commander-in-chief adopted

strategies in Afghanistan that require years, if not decades, to bear fruit? Ballou innocent a foreign policy analyst at the Cato Institute comments.

What distinction is President Obama trying to draw by suggesting that the strategy in Afghanistan now is one that can work.

I don't think too many things have actually changed in the past several months, let alone

years, as far as policy is concerned.

The United States is still committed to promoting a strengthened, accountable,

non-corrupt Afghan government in Afghanistan.

And I think one of the problems is that we have yet to sort of decouple the al-Qaeda threat to the United States with propping up and perpetuating a failed state in Central Asia.

And recently, President Obama said that we have fairly modest goals in

Afghanistan. However when you actually look at the policy and the goals of this

administration it's to never allow terrorists to re-emerge in Afghanistan

and to prevent them from creating large-scale training camps that they could use against

the United States. On its face, those sound like very modest policies.

Of course, we'd want to try and prevent terrorists from re-emerging in Afghanistan.

But that also creates a convenient rationale to prolong the mission in perpetuity.

Number one, number two, if we say that we don't want terrorists to re-emerge in any part of the world,

that's sort of an open-ended justification to intervene anywhere we want.

So these aren't modest goals in the least.

That's just in theory. Also you have to look at the policies themselves that we're talking about

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