This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Friday, June 25, 2010.

I'm Caleb Brown.

The removal of Stanley McChrystal from overseeing forces in Afghanistan may do precious little

to refocus attention on the viability of the larger Afghan mission.

President Obama, for his part, may have as much faith as ever in a top-down solution for a country that has resisted precisely that kind of planning for a very long time.

So says Malu innocent, foreign policy analyst at the Cato Institute.

How do you assess the McChrystal episode given his replacement David Petraeus has had a fairly downbeat assessment of the Afghanistan mission, especially very recently.

I think that the episode with General Stanley McCrystal has served to obscure the deeper problems

within Afghanistan and the larger problems

with the mission more generally. In fact the recent offensive in Marja in

southern Afghanistan has been widely condemned as a failure. In fact General McChrystal

referred to it as a bleeding ulcer.

It's widely known now that the Afghan police patrol it during the day, the Taliban

patrol it at night, and this was supposed to be a village that was going to be touted as

this new surge of momentum for the coalition, unfortunately again that's sort of been failing.

This is also one reason why the Kandahar offensive has been pushed back to autumn.

This was supposed to be something that happened in the summertime

but there have been many problems in sort of having enough Afghan officials that can hold territory once cleared.

There are problems also with the level of support within the Afghan people for those offenses.

So this whole episode, this whole

controversy with McChrystal has really just sort of overshadowed these deeper

problems with the mission. Is it reasonable to call Hamid Karzai a scapegoat

...