This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, October 7, 2009.

I'm Caleb Brown.

It's been eight years in Afghanistan with no end in sight.

What will be the effects of a continued engagement

in Afghanistan on nuclear armed Pakistan? Cato Institute Foreign Policy

analyst Maloo Innocent, co-author of a new Cato paper escaping the graveyard of empires, comments.

The notion that we need more troops in Afghanistan is based on the false belief and the

false premise that the United States in order to remain secure must defeat the Taliban insurgency.

What we've seen at least over the past eight years is a gradual expansion of the mission's objectives.

The narrow counterterrorism objective that we had in 2001

was to go after Osama bin Laden and the Al Qaeda organization

responsible for 9-11.

But over the past year, year and a half,

we've seen the mission broaden into an open-ended nation

building campaign.

Now we're being told that U.S. troops must protect the villages of Afghanistan to create

a legitimate political system and try and create effective economic development and programs for the

Afghan people.

This sort of represents not only just the gradual transformation of a policy, but the conflation of al-Qaeda with the

Taliban.

Al-Qaeda is responsible for 9-11.

Al-Qaeda is a loose decentralized structure that we can continue to progress, to make progress

...