President Obama announced yesterday that he would be launching another 30,000 troops into Afghanistan in an effort to pull out by July 2011. I can already hear the cries: “I’m never voting for Obama again! He’s another Bush!” But do people really understand what’s going on?

Let’s be honest, Obama was never going to be able to remove the troops from Afghanistan immediately. Since our original insurgence destroyed the country’s infrastructure, and with it any viable democratic faction that could have possibly wielded political power, leaving the country would inevitably leave the Taliban to fill the power void. Not to mention that Karzai’s regime is already so corrupt that his control would probably create an even worse police state.

Furthermore, the conflict in Afghanistan is all part of a much bigger battle against Al Qaeda, which involves Pakistan, India, and at this point, China and maybe even Russia. What was the Bush administration’s war has now turned into a power struggle with a military industrial complex, and each country has its own best interest at heart. Sorry to break it to ya’ll, but this isn’t simply about freeing an enslaved people (as no war ever is), and we’re stuck in this quagmire.

We think that it’s only America that is war weary, but the truth is that the decisions made by the previous administration have left a bad taste in the mouth of the rest of the world. Who cares if the U.S. has come to the rescue of the European nations multiple times? The conditions left to us by the previous administration seem hopeless, the NATO budget is destroyed and Europe is stubbornly refusing to give us a hand. So it’s pretty obvious that the situation at hand in Afghanistan is dire, and the troops need assistance. We have minimal aid coming in from other nations, so its been left to Obama, and Americans, to pick up the slack.

However, I do have a bone to pick with the president. Does he really think 18 months is enough time to set up a puppet government, restore infrastructure and equip the civilians with the authority to create stability for themselves? We couldn’t do much in eight years; what makes him think that, without much European support, there will be any difference? A friend of mine returned home from Afghanistan last semester, and as I grilled him on his opinion about Obama’s decision, he stated, point blank, that an insurgency of this magnitude will take at least 10 to 15 years to have its full effect. This seems to be a fact that many people don’t even understand. Call me a Republican, a warmonger, a right-wing conservative, what have you, but setting such an arbitrary date gives the Taliban the impression that all they have to do is wait out the storm, and then the country is theirs for the taking.

So I guess all this means is that plans are already being made for a second Woodstock, supported by those pseudo-liberals who only see this as waging a war, but don’t understand the greater complexities surrounding Obama’s decision. There will be protests, Obama will lose support from the left and our generation will remain utterly confused as to whether we should support the destruction of the Al Qaeda and its extremism, or just leave the Middle East to fend for itself.