I voted for Barack Obama because he said that he was going to withdraw troops from Iraq. Now, with last week's announcement to send 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan, I don't know what to think.

I have never been pro-war, but I do trust our leader's decisions to provide the United States with optimum security. I have family in the Marines who were stationed in Iraq. I went to school with people who served both in Afghanistan and Iraq.

In talking to these people, I realized that while none of them wanted to be there, they all thought that it was necessary for the safety of our country and for their safety to hold positions across seas.

This March will make the war in Afghanistan the United States' longest war, surpassing Vietnam. It is still unclear to me whether or not it is worth it to be over there. The people that I have talked to claim that the Iraqis and Afghanis both, for the most part, welcome our presence in their countries. For me, however, there is still no clear reason why we are there.

After Sept. 11, we targeted Iraq and Saddam Hussein as well as Osama bin Laden. I am still unsure of what Iraq had to do with Sept. 11 but we took Hussein out of power anyway, and had him hanged. We still have no word on bin Laden.

There is no clear truth about this war. There is so much propaganda circulating that it makes it hard to believe what anybody has to say.

It is difficult to come up with my own opinion of the war because I am constantly bombarded with someone else's opinion on why we should or shouldn't be occupying these countries.

It is eight years later and I still feel like I know about as much of the war as when it was started. I want to believe that the reason that we are over there is to help the people in those countries and to stop terrorism. I just don't know if that is true.

Politics are notorious for serving as a platform for politician's personal interest.

Is Obama just another self-serving politician who has his own interests at heart? Or, is he truly America's savior in the sense that he will solve all of our problems, primarily ending the death and destruction that this war has caused?

People are already starting to compare Afghanistan to Vietnam in the sense that we are fighting a war that we cannot and will not win.

While Vietnam's death toll far exceeds the deaths in Afghanistan, the public obviously fears the same result. At what point will we say enough is enough? When will this war end and when will the troops come home? An even scarier question is, what will happen when they do?

My hope is that we are doing the right thing and protecting Americans from harm. My fear is that the past eight years was for nothing.