Resignation
A disappointment. Former Marine Capt. Matthew Hoh, with intense and traumatic duty in Iraq, who became a PRT team member in Zabul, Afghanistan, has resigned from the Foreign Service and refused high-level offers to stay onboard. Washington Post:
… last month, in a move that has sent ripples all the way to the White House, Hoh, 36, became the first U.S. official known to resign in protest over the Afghan war, which he had come to believe simply fueled the insurgency.
“I have lost understanding of and confidence in the strategic purposes of the United States’ presence in Afghanistan,” he wrote Sept. 10 in a four-page letter to the department’s head of personnel. “I have doubts and reservations about our current strategy and planned future strategy, but my resignation is based not upon how we are pursuing this war, but why and to what end.”
The reaction to Hoh’s letter was immediate. Senior U.S. officials, concerned that they would lose an outstanding officer and perhaps gain a prominent critic, appealed to him to stay.
U.S. Ambassador Karl W. Eikenberry brought him to Kabul and offered him a job on his senior embassy staff. Hoh declined. From there, he was flown home for a face-to-face meeting with Richard C. Holbrooke, the administration’s special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan.
“We took his letter very seriously, because he was a good officer,” Holbrooke said in an interview. “We all thought that given how serious his letter was, how much commitment there was, and his prior track record, we should pay close attention to him.”
While he did not share Hoh’s view that the war “wasn’t worth the fight,” Holbrooke said, “I agreed with much of his analysis.” He asked Hoh to join his team in Washington, saying that “if he really wanted to affect policy and help reduce the cost of the war on lives and treasure,” why not be “inside the building, rather than outside, where you can get a lot of attention but you won’t have the same political impact?”
Hoh accepted the argument and the job, but changed his mind a week later. “I recognize the career implications, but it wasn’t the right thing to do,” he said in an interview Friday, two days after his resignation became final.
“I’m not some peacenik, pot-smoking hippie who wants everyone to be in love,” Hoh said.
Hoh advises scaling back in Afghanistan, says our presence there is the problem. Lefty bloggers and Vice President Joe Biden’s foreign policy advisor are all over it, much as lefty bloggers and anti-war politicians were all over the despair from 12 captains and 7 NCOs who had served in Iraq a few years ago.
Read the whole thing. Single-page version here. The disappointment and surprise of some who served on the ground with him is saved for last. Full text of his letter here. It highlights some of the very real problems of the situation in Afghanistan, but concludes that remaining in Afghanistan requires, “if honest,” that we have to invade Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, the Sudan, etc. Maybe we will before this long war is done. Hard to say. It wouldn’t be the first time, whether in a short four-year war or a 45-year-long one, that we’d had to fight multiple fronts to reomve tyranny and secure freedom in the world. Hoh also includes a Vietnam reference that, tellingly, assumes that failure in Afghanistan is as inevitable as many believe failure in Vietnam was.
Surrender-happy lefty bloggers Greenwald and Attackerman salute the despair. Counterinsurgency blogger and Iraq vet Abu Muqawama offers some perspective on the despair-inducing qualities of Zabul province and the fight there from his own time in Afghanistan. Lefty blogger Taylor Marsh indulges in some gratuitous Bush-bash, but notes our moral obligation and some of the downsides of surrender. I’d add our vital national security interest.
Matthew Hoh is obviously more than entitled to his opinion, and entitled to respect for his choices. I don’t think as a nation we are in a position to take counsel of our despair and succumb to resignation, however. Any more than we had that option in Iraq. Any more than we did in Vietnam, where we did anyway. At a cost of several million Southeast Asian lives, and at a cost to the United States that we continue to pay today, as referenced periodically by our adversaries who believe they can apply the lesson of Vietnam: If you bleed them, they will run. Which I’d suggest is a hint that abandoning Afghanistan may cause more problems than it solves.
Blackfive takes us down Despair’s own Memory Lane. It’s just off Surge Street.
O via HotAir: “I will never rush you into harm’s way.” Yeah, that’s pretty clear.
O via Mudville: “‘We are not going to have a situation in which you are not fully supported back here at home.” … I wonder what he meant by that.”
Gateway: Biden’s popularity lower than Cheney’s. Ouch. And that’s just their first years. Stay tuned.
Surber: Graveyard of Empires? Not so fast. Meanwhile, not unrelated, not so different, Surber with Krauthammer Unplugged on O’s Nobel.
Ha! Legal Insurrection: Kerry, against the Afghan surge, may be for it.
We are losing in Afghanistan, on two fronts. The most important center of gravity of the conflict — as the Taliban well recognizes — is the American public …
The second front we’re losing is the Afghans themselves, who are the United States’ center of gravity in the Afghan war. Eight years into this conflict, America and its NATO allies — who are still looked on favorably by a majority of Afghans — are not providing large swaths of the Afghan population with the most basic public good, which is security.
It’s time to table fancy counterinsurgency doctrines about “connecting the Afghan people to the government” — Afghans have never had, and don’t expect much, in the way of services from their government, and it’s time now to focus on something much more basic: security.
Michael Sheehan at Wash Times on Counterterrorism vs. Counterinsurgency. One is not exclusive of the other, nor is Switzerland-in-the-Hindu-Kush the goalpost. Meanwhile, let’s celebrate some success.
SF Maj. Jim Gant, via Steven Pressfield: “One tribe at a time, a strategy for success.” No time to read it just now. Looks interesting.
(The latter two links via your always essential Small Wars Journal. The Bergen link via Thunder Run, which has your quick and dirty Iraq/Aghan roundup.)
Meanwhile, don’t forget the Marines who are still in the fight, at home and abroad.
The Valour IT push is on, to give laptops to wounded servicemen. At the invitation of Cassandra at Villainous Company, whose Marine husband is forward deployed in Afghanistan, we’re with Team Marines this year. Pushing the Marines ahead is just the fun part of the drive. It all goes to everyone in all branches. Give as you can.
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Topics: Afghanistan, military
Posted by Jules Crittenden at 11:08 am Comments (4) on Tuesday, October 27, 2009
4 Responses to “Resignation”
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October 27th, 2009 at 1:58 pm
Well, I see- AS usual your about a day ahead of me on things. But I think it would do well to repeat Hoh’s words here yet again:
“I fail to see the value or the worth in continued U.S. casualties or expenditures of resources in support of the Afghan government in what is, truly, a 35 year old civil war.”
But why does he believe and say that?
“Like the Soviets, we continue to secure and bolster a failing state, while encouraging an ideology and system of government unknown and unwanted by it’s people.”
He lays out this for us to consider:
“In both RC East and South, I have observed that the bulk of the insurgency fights not for the white banner of the Taliban, but rather against the presence of foreign soldiers and taxes imposed by an unrepresentative government in Kabul”.
The way he put it there sounds a lot like the 1700s in America, doesn’t it?
Except that there are important differences. Americans even then were mostly educated, could read and write and not tribal in spirit or local organization. Townships, states and perhaps class, but not tribal nor primitive like the majority of rural Afghanistan is now. One other difference is that America at that time was a religious people that believed that personal corruption was a black mark upon their soul. I don’t believe that Islam (when practiced) is the same as Christianity regarding corruption and lies.
From everything I have read, corruption in the middle and far east has always been a part of everyday life and not looked upon the same way.
So was he right to resign? If it was right in his mind and heart, yes it was, because that is what counts. Could he be of help and should he have stayed in the fight? I think maybe later he will, but right now he has to gather his wits and give his soul time to heal.
I think that as long as the present government is in power in Afghanistan- there will be no way to garner support for the government and to shed the support of the Taliban. Even if they shed the current government I believe the majority of the people are just not ready for anything other than local/district-tribal government, and it may be years before they are.
Papa Ray
Central Texas
October 27th, 2009 at 10:29 pm
[...] the campaign in Afghanistan. He sees no reason whatsoever for the U.S. to be engaged there. Jules Crittenden opines of Hoh’s letter: It highlights some of the very real problems of the situation in [...]
October 28th, 2009 at 12:52 am
Read the Gant paper at pressfield’s. Its the only small footprint strategy I’ve heard of so far that stands an excellent chance of actually working and has no particular dependencies on Kabul or NATO politics.
If you read anything at all about Afghanistan, Gant’s paper should be it.
October 28th, 2009 at 2:22 pm
[...] many argue that Hoh’s resignation is honorable but won’t make much of a difference, I, like Spencer Ackerman, think the opposite: He is a trail-blazer, a battle-tested military man [...]