This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Thursday, December 4th, 2008.

I'm Caleb Brown.

An incoming Democratic administration now will contend with trouble on both sides of Pakistan.

The attacks in India throw a huge wrench into President-elect Obama's plans for a regional

approach to stabilizer Pakistan.

Willu innocent a foreign policy analyst at the Cato Institute offers her thoughts.

President Bush and Conaliza Rice must play damage control within the region and try and mitigate against the possibility of these countries

again going sort of going to war with one another.

The biggest problem for US policy within the region would be the possibility of Pakistan moves its

forces from the Western Tribal Areas border in Afghanistan and move them toward the

eastern border with India. This would relieve pressure on Taliban and al-Qaeda

militants operating in the tribal areas and could have a direct impact on the

stability operations within Afghanistan.

And so going forward, what the United States must try and do is something similar to what it did in 2001,

2002 after ISI had links to another terrorist attack within New Delhi after a year when both

India and Pakistan en masse troops along their international border.

Luckily, no hostilities ensued after that year,

but we want to try and mitigate and gets the possibility

of that of any sort of spiraling conflict

happening in the near future. You've described U.S. exerting influence in Pakistan as a toxic embrace.

How does the United States exert influence on both sides of Pakistan without appearing to do so?

Well that's an interesting question because I think that President-elect Barack Obama has said

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