This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Monday, August 15, 2011.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Are we learning the right lessons from the tragic and deadly attacks on U.S. forces in Afghanistan

when we recognize that most gains in war are always fragile and

reversible, the decision to leave a country should become much easier.

So says Malu innocent, foreign policy analyst to the Cato Institute, and co-author of the Cato Report escaping

the graveyard of empires.

I think the lesson from this incident should be that terrorism is a low-cost, high-output tactic. that

that definitely bleeds the enemy if it's a conventional force.

And as we've seen in Afghanistan,

according to some estimates we're spending upwards of $125 million a day on operations.

And you look at the Taliban insurgents.

They're wearing sandals and shoal or commissamises and they're able to fire an RPG at a

Chinook helicopter that per unit cost is roughly $35 million.

And that's not even including the number of Navy SEALs who were killed, the years

of training, language expertise, I mean that sort of loss is incalculable.

I think that's what we sort of need to understand is that terrorism will always

went out in the end of the day and that's a lesson we haven't learned from Vietnam.

The terrorists can always spend another day in this region. They decline to fight

when conditions are inhospitable, They can move to different areas.

They blend in with the local population.

This is a very difficult war and it's one that we shouldn't be fighting and we can't afford to continue waging.

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