This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, January 9th, 2013.

I'm Caleb Brown. As Afghan leader Hamid Karzai speaks in Washington this week,

and President Obama considers troop levels in Afghanistan.

It's a good time to once again re-evaluate the U.S. mission there and what the U.S. has achieved.

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

President Obama has yet to make a decision on how fast he will withdraw the 66,000 U.S. troops that still remain in Afghanistan.

Although he has promised to substantially decrease U.S. force levels,

last May he and President Hamid Karzai signed a long-term strategic partnership agreement

and that really commits the United States to the security and stability of Afghanistan at least through 2024. Just last week General John

Allen, the commander in Afghanistan, provided the White House with a number of

options for a residual US troop presence that ranged from as low as 6,000 US troops to as high as 20,000 US troops.

But I think it's important to keep in mind when we hear these numbers being bandied about that no specific number ensures either success or failure against these

militant groups in the region. We have to keep in mind that over a hundred thousand

allied troops were unable to successfully sustain the gains that they made and sort of

consolidate the conquest that they had.

I think part of that is because the nature of the insurgency, you know, just last April,

the Pentagon released a report that found that the Taliban led

insurgency remains highly adaptive. It has significant regenerative capacity.

It is able to operate with impunity through high- attacks, targeted assassinations, a shadow government.

Even the Afghanistan Highway 1, this is a 300 mile ring road that links Kabul to the Kandahar province in the south, even

that has been frequently interdicted by Taliban militants.

So we've been really unable to connect and translate our short-term gains, which have been

...