This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Thursday, June 23rd, 2011.

I'm Caleb Brown.

President Obama has pledged to reduce troop levels in Afghanistan to far

higher numbers than when he took office.

Lou Innocent, a foreign policy analyst at the Cato Institute comments.

President Obama triples U.S. troops in Afghanistan and then is going to cut it back to more troops in Afghanistan than when he took office. Why is this impressive?

He's able to stick to his pledge to begin withdrawing the number of U.S. troops and that's all that really matters in terms of the political equation because he can appease his anti-war base.

But when you actually look at the data, as you mentioned, they'll still be twice as many U.S. troops

in Afghanistan compared to when Obama took office if you look ahead to fall 2012. So even

though he is sort of appeasing the anti-war crowd a bit, they're still up in arms about the fact that we have doubled down,

we are increasing our presence and it doesn't appear to be at least any sort of end date for the residual

troop presence, much less the semi-permanent

bases that still remain scattered throughout the country.

All right.

Was there anything surprising in what he said?

A little bit, in the sense that he seems to be narrowing down toward a direction of

counterterrorism rather than this large-scale counter-insurgency slash state

building hybrid that we have going on right now. I think the deeper problem is that

he still continues to link Al-Qaeda in the Taliban.

And we know that these are very distinct organizations with very different global and regional

objectives.

And if we continue to sort of conflate these groups, I think again we sort of expand the number of enemies that we might be continued to fight.

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