This is the Kaidu Daily Podcast for Tuesday, August 13th, 2019.

I'm Caleb Brown.

It is well past time for the United States to depart Afghanistan.

Overcoming inertia is a new Cato policy analysis available today.

In it, co-author and Cato Zone John Glazer details why the U.S US must end its longest war. How long has the US been

at war in Afghanistan? We've been fighting in Afghanistan for about 18 years.

Roughly two decades.

It's the longest war in U.S. history.

And I think part of the reason, the main reason it's gone on this long is not because of the battlefield realities or because we can't achieve

our mission which we can't but rather because the policy makers just have not asked the hard questions and face the hard

realities of our presence there. So shortly after we invaded Afghanistan following the 9-11

attacks, you know we adopted objectives on the one hand establishing a functioning independent

Democratic state in Kabul that could effectively govern the whole

country and then secondly to defeat the Taliban insurgency.

This mission was intended to ensure that Al Qaeda or related groups couldn't use Afghanistan as a kind of haven to conduct transnational terrorist

attacks.

We've failed miserably at these two objectives. I mean the regime in Kabul ranks

is one of the worst in the world in terms of corruption and respect for human rights in the rule of law. It effectively can't exercise sovereignty

much beyond the territory of the alive and well, as violent as it has ever been.

The war is essentially stalemated.

And internal US assessments have long appreciated this. There's just no military solution to this conflict.

And the reason it persists is just because we haven't we haven't asked the hard

...