This is a Cato special podcast. I'm Caleb Brown. President Obama's newly announced

Afghanistan strategy is full of internal contradictions, apparently pushing

toward both expanding and ending a war that is now dragged on for eight years,

as the scope of the mission has expanded dramatically.

So says Christopher Preble, director of the Cato Institute's Foreign Policy Studies.

I think the question today is, what exactly are we doing in Afghanistan and that was the same question before the

president gave his speech.

It is possible to take that speech and parse out individual paragraphs that you might like or you might hate.

For example, I particularly liked his reference to Eisenhower.

I love it when Democrats reference Eisenhower because Republicans

choose not to anymore. But the bottom line is this. We're sending more troops

to Afghanistan.

Iraq Obama has presided over a dramatic escalation.

He has more than double the number of troops in Afghanistan since when he took office and that those

actions speak far louder than his words last night or frankly any of the words coming out of the White House throughout this entire strategic review process.

My point has always been if the object is as ambitious as they have laid out, which is to really reshape Afghan society,

then 30,000 troops isn't nearly enough, but neither is 300,000 troops,

and no one in their right mind is talking about that.

So that is the fundamental contradiction at the heart of this strategy and his speech last night did not resolve that in some respects it only confused it even further.

Let me be extremely cynical.

If the idea here as a political matter is to take Afghanistan off of the

front page for some period of time it looks a lot like the Iraq surge.

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