This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Thursday, April 24th, 2008. I'm Caleb Brown.

The U.S. may be in danger of pulling in Iraq in Afghanistan.

That's the conclusion of Ben Ben Friedman a research fellow in defense

and homeland security studies at the Cato Institute.

What we've learned in Iraq for those who didn't already know it is that the United States

military is not capable of forcing social transformation on societies, of building new governments,

of forcing people disinclined to cooperate to cooperate.

That's not exactly news to scholars of international relations, but

I guess it's news to most of Washington or a lot of the American people who

thought because our military is so competent at

destroying other militaries that it could do pretty much anything and we forgot

about the limits of our power so we're seeing that now in Iraq we're seeing the

difficulty of transforming foreign societies and making people march to our tune.

And we ought to keep that in mind in Afghanistan.

So my point is in the op-ed is that we should limit our objectives to things we can do, which is hunting terrorists.

And I don't think we should give up on nation building in Afghanistan.

We can train foreign troops and things of that ilk, but we should cut down on our ambitions significantly.

From Democratic politicians, much of the talk about Iraq and Afghanistan has been to contrast them.

They have said, I didn't support our invasion of Iraq

but I definitely support making sure that we succeed in Afghanistan.

Yeah well I mean I think it is sort of difficult for Democrats to talk about

Afghanistan in what I think of as a sensible way these days because it's hard to tell

...