This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, August 18th, 2021.

I'm Caleb Brown.

The departure of the U.S. from Afghanistan and the apparent ease with which the Taliban seized the country raises many questions

among them. Was this what we were preventing for 20 years? Did we waste trillions of dollars

if this is how it ends? The U.S. really achieve anything, Cato Institute Senior Fellow Justin Logan discusses the new reality in Afghanistan.

On the departure from Afghanistan it seems that at least partisans have all fallen into relatively familiar

camps with respect to laying blame for it. First the policy this seems clearly to have been the right decision.

Well, I think the implementation of the policy has caused things to be fogged up in a sense,

right? Nobody likes to open Twitter and find an image of a human being falling off a US Air Force jet from several

hundred feet to his death.

So there's a certain grim visual to what's going on.

But I think people have this sense, and maybe the most common misperception is that there was some way to

freeze the status quo in amber. We have 2,500 troops on the ground, things are sort of

limping along, there's no Taliban takeover and isn't that something worth preserving forever?

And you could certainly argue that it would be, except for the fact that

Taliban restraint was in part a function of the Doha diplomatic process, in large part a function of that diplomatic process.

The Taliban have not been attacking U.S. forces for over a year because of commitments that were made and on both sides here to forekept.

I mean, Biden was supposed to have all US personnel out originally under that agreement by May and said we're not going to make it by

May but we'll make it by September the 11th. And the Taliban to this point and you know don, don't quote me on this going on in perpetuity, have shown some restraint.

The Taliban have helped to secure the airport, the road to the airport, to the Kabul Airport.

Yesterday you had a Taliban official do an interview on television with a female journalist.

They've granted what they're calling a general amnesty, which will I think allow the

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