This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Tuesday, May 5th, 2009.

I'm Caleb Brown.

This is a consequential week for U.S. strategy in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

The Obama administration perhaps should look more seriously

at scaling back military and diplomatic efforts to modest achievable goals.

So says Cato Institute Foreign Policy analyst, Malou Innocent.

Today a special envoy for Afghanistan and Pakistan, Richard Holbrooke, will be speaking before the House Foreign Affairs Committee and he'll be speaking before the House Foreign Affairs Committee and

he'll essentially be discussing President Obama's strategic review of events in

Afghanistan and Pakistan. What's interesting however is that Richard Holbrook will be anticipated to be speaking mostly about Pakistan because that appears to be the center of gravity of the war in Afghanistan.

In fact, I would make the analogy that Pakistan is to Afghanistan what Cambodia was to Vietnam,

where there is a vast reservoir of well-trained militants who cross a very porous border

and are destabilizing U.S. efforts in this country.

Also later on this week what we'll see is President Obama host a trilateral summit meeting

with Afghan President Hamid Karzai and Pakistani President Asifalizadari. And they're supposed to be also discussing... President destabilizing U.S. efforts in the region.

Unfortunately, it appears that the Obama administration, or any administration for that

matter will be unlikely to affect stability, lasting peace, and human rights in Afghanistan for an

assortment of reasons. If you look at the country it's been battle-scarred,

war ravaged, has gone through civil war and this is essentially just the past 30 years if you look at the country

hundreds of years out it's been very difficult to affect any sort of strong central government, governed centrally from Kabul.

So really this is a very daunting mission for the Obama administration and again for any administration

and I really think that we must begin to have more realistic goals for Afghanistan and for Pakistan.

We need to recognize that stability in this region will be convoluted and very messy for possibly a very long time and that if we simply

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