Policy Forum

Should the United States Withdraw from Afghanistan?

September 14, 2009 12:00 PM to 2:00 PM EDT

Auditorium/Wintergarden

Featuring Malou Innocent, Foreign Policy Analyst, Cato Institute, and co‐author of Escaping the ‘Graveyard of Empires’: A Strategy to Exit Afghanistan; Celeste Ward, Senior Defense Analyst, RAND Corp.; Patrick M. Cronin, Director of the Institute for National Strategic Studies, National Defense University; Robert Naiman, National Coordinator, Just Foreign Policy; and Ted Galen Carpenter, Vice President for Defense and Foreign Policy Studies, Cato Institute, and co‐author of Escaping the ‘Graveyard of Empires’: A Strategy to Exit Afghanistan. Moderated by Christopher Preble, Director of Foreign Policy Studies, Cato Institute.

Join the conversation on Twitter using #CatoEvents. Follow @CatoEvents on Twitter to get future event updates, live streams, and videos from the Cato Institute. If you have questions or need assistance registering for the event, please email our staff at events@cato.org.

Nearly eight years after the fall of the Taliban regime, Afghanistan struggles under the most brutal circumstances: corrupt and ineffective state institutions; thousands of miles of unguarded borders; pervasive illiteracy and poverty; and a dysfunctional international alliance attempting to provide security for the country. Can “nation‐building” in the midst of a bloody insurgency succeed in such an environment? What constitutes “success,” and what price should we be willing to pay for it? Does the United States have a compelling strategic rationale for remaining in Afghanistan? Please join us for a lively discussion.