How will you spend your Thanksgiving break?
The news that 30,000 additional American troops will deploy to Afghanistan by summer 2010 was greeted with praise, criticism and apathy from NYU campus voices.
In an address at West Point Tuesday, President Obama said additional American forces would strengthen the ability of Afghanistan's government to rule effectively without U.S. presence in the future.
But for Jack Sherman, the associate director of peacekeeping and security sector reform at NYU's Center on International Cooperation, to attempt to garner support for the Afghani government is to fight a losing battle at this point.
"The problem is the Afghan government has lost tremendous legitimacy," Sherman said. "So I don't see how we're going to be able to capitalize on the window of opportunity that more American troops will create."
Sherman also said 30,000 added troops — there are currently 68,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan — won't be enough to make the country safe.
"There are still huge swaths of the country that the number of troops will be unable to secure," Sherman said. "It's basically too few troops to broadly secure the Afghan population and too few to really have a major impact."
Many students interviewed did not have strong opinions about the troop surge. According to NYU politics professor Patrick Egan, this is not surprising: The continued war in Afghanistan is not a priority issue for most Americans, he said, unless a large number of Americans are killed in combat.
Egan added: "If Osama bin Laden is captured, dead or alive, then that will certainly draw a lot of attention. But absent that, this thing is going to grind on without the typical American paying much attention to it."
For CAS junior Matt Albatross, capturing Osama bin Laden is indeed an important motivating factor in increasing American troop presence.
"I think it's great. More troops equals more defense," Albatross said. "America's main goal in Afghanistan is to find Osama Bin Laden."
Obama also outlined a withdrawal plan for troops to begin exiting Afghanistan in July 2011. Javier Alvarado, a 26-year-old Army Reserve member who applied to NYU, said the U.S. withdrawal could compromise the Afghan government's ability to provide social services.
"A lot of people are focusing on what's happening in the present. They're sending a lot of troops there to help build local provinces, schools, hospitals," Alvarado said. "After we leave Afganistan, how will the government support them?"
