This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Friday, December 11, 2009.

I'm Caleb Brown.

The escalation of war in Afghanistan means several things,

an attempt at counterinsurgency in the population centers, larger attempted

counterterrorism in more remote regions, and an attempt to get Afghans to stop growing

opium poppies in favor of that cash crop of cash crops, wheat.

Ted Gheelen Carpenter, Vice President for Defense and Foreign Policy Studies at the Cato

Institute, is co-author of the new paper, Escaping the graveyard of empires,

a strategy to exit Afghanistan. We spoke yesterday.

Unfortunately, all of it amounts to nation building without the label.

And it's a policy built on a foundation of fallacies, starting with the notion that we will have

reliable partners in Afghanistan with the Karzai government and the embryonic army and police forces,

all of which are both incompetent and corrupt.

He also assumes that we're going to both incompetent and corrupt.

He also assumes that we're going to have a nice partnership with Pakistan

essentially to seal the border

so that militant fighters just can't melt across the border into Pakistan.

Again, given the performance of Pakistan in the past, I have no idea why he assumes

that the strategy will work on this occasion.

Among the people who live along the border of Pakistan in Afghanistan

is that border even recognized?

I mean, is it viewed as a border?

...