This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, June 8, 2011.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Will we really see an accelerated drawdown of US forces in Afghanistan?

Malu innocent foreign policy analyst at the Cato Institute says there are plenty of reasons

to think that the drawdown won't happen as hoped. Well, it's unclear whether we're actually going to see the expected drawdown, at least as

far as President Obama has anticipated.

There will be a drawdown beginning this July, and some analysts expect that it will

be between 3,000 and 5,000 U.S. troops out of the 100,000 troops, roughly, that are already

there right now.

But you're already seeing sort of a pushback against any steeper reductions that President

Obama's national security team advised earlier this week.

Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and military commanders on the field are advising

for sort of not so much deep cuts but rather sort of maintaining a higher level of combat

force into next year. I assume because they're anticipating more

bloodshed this coming summer and also because a great number of the gains that we

have had on the ground have been quote you know fragile and reversible according to

General David Petraeus so I don't really anticipate any substantial drawdown

beyond the 3 to 5,000 what some have called a token withdrawal and that's

unfortunate I think that we can easily

see tens of thousands of U.S. troops being withdrawn for a narrow counterterrorism mission.

But in terms of a grand strategy, Afghanistan weighs heavily on the minds of most analysts, but unfortunately,

we don't really see the full scope of the problems there.

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