This is the Kato Daily Podcast for Tuesday, June 19th, 2018. I'm Caleb Brown.

What makes trauma? How has the trauma that has visited the people of Afghanistan for nearly 40 years helped

admire the country and dysfunction.

Eric Gopner, a Cato Institute visiting scholar, is author of the new paper War State Trauma

State, why Afghanistan remains stuck in conflict.

This is the second part of our interview.

The U.S. mission in Afghanistan was to take out the Taliban,

and then it gets fuzzy for me at least and one of the

goals was eventually to bring some democratic processes to the country. But if I read what you write and if you are correct, then that is impossible.

That is not something that democracy you argue is ill-suited to a country that is as

dysfunctional as Afghanistan has been for 40 years.

Correct. Democracy by definition involves an active

participative electorate and it also involves a responsive government

responsive to the the wishes of its constituents.

So they must be able to provide goods and services,

be seen as adding value.

And in Afghanistan, you have 40 years of the highest levels of trauma, not just war, but torture, rape, natural disasters.

40 years, so two complete generations have endured that.

There is not a coherent Afghan identity 40 years later. It is a fracturing

Afghans or shells of who they were 40 years prior.

And just

a coherent Afghan identity you say is just very wrong-headed.

...