My dad always told me, “Son, you can’t have it both ways”. Evidently no one ever told Barack Obama. In the same breath he uses to deploy 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan, he is reportedly going to set a timetable for withdrawal beginning in July of 2011. It makes me want to say, “POTUS, you can’t have it both ways”; even if you’re the President of the United States.

In tonight’s Afghanistan speech, President Obama clearly aims to lay the blame for the state of the war effort there at the feet of the previous Administration. Anyone with half a brain knows that’s what the Senate report on Tora Bora was all about. Obama has been at odds with himself as to how he can look tough on defense while at the same time appeal to his left-wing base’s call for a complete and total pull out.

Here’s his conundrum, not wanting to look weak like we know he is, he’s forced to send additional troops to Afghanistan to battle the current resurgence of the Taliban. Not wanting to look like a hawk, he’s forced to give his base what they’ve been wanting for years, a timetable for withdrawal. Mr. Obama is trying to have it both ways. And that’s the problem when you try to be all things to all people. Eventually you have to make a decision that one group or the other isn’t going to like.

In setting a timetable for withdrawal, yet stipulating that it’s simply a ploy to create urgency within the Afghan government, he is essentially telling the Taliban to stand down until we’re gone. By invoking the ideal reaction of the Afghan government into this process, he’s setting up his next scapegoat for when things head south. And they will. The insurgency and the Taliban in Afghanistan are a patient bunch, they can wait another year and a half for U.S. troops to withdraw.

Even in succumbing to General McChrystal’s request for more troops, and that’s what he did, he succumbed, he refused to give the General exactly what he asked for. McChrystal wanted at least 40,000 more boots on the ground, after months of waffling, Obama gives him 30,000. Not only that, but a timetable attached as well.

Days after a Senate report, initiated by none other than John Kerry, claims that Bin Laden could have and should have been dealt with in 2001, Obama will announce his intentions for Afghanistan to the world. Making clear that it’s not his fault that he’s doing what he’s doing, and making it just as clear that when it fails it won’t be his fault either. Maybe he really does believe you can have it both ways; let’s just hope the voters in 2010 and 2012 remind him that you can’t.