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Message from a Marine
Diplomat's resignation thought provoking
President Obama got a message last month he may not have wanted. It was, however, one he needed to hear. Because of it, he - and we - have some questions to answer about U.S. involvement in Afghanistan. Chief among them is what should be the simplest: What are we doing there?
Mathew Hoh was a Foreign Service official, the highest ranking U.S. civilian in the Afghan province of Zabul. He resigned last month in protest over American involvement in the war there, which he had come to believe was feeding the insurgency.
In a letter to the State Department's personnel chief, Hoh said, "I have lost understanding of and confidence in the strategic purposes of the United States' presence in Afghanistan. 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." That is a stinging rebuke, not because it is harsh or impolite - nothing about Hoh suggests anything like that - but because it is so clear. If it is not possible to say what you are doing and why, it is ridiculous to argue about how to go about it. And that is where U.S. involvement in Afghanistan is now.
Hoh's critique is doubly damning because of who and what he is. Before joining the Foreign Service, Hoh was a captain in the Marine Corps whose combat experience in Iraq was characterized by another Marine as exemplifying "uncommon bravery." Nor is he a stereotypical protester. "I'm not some peacenik, pot-smoking hippie who wants everyone to be in love," Hoh told The Washington Post. "There are plenty of dudes who need to be killed. I was never more happy than when our Iraq team whacked a bunch of guys." But in Afghanistan he says, the United States is asking its troops to fight and die in somebody else's civil war. While he recognizes that the Taliban is evil and al-Qaida needs to be dealt with, he says the Afghans are attacking U.S. forces not out of any profound hatred or opposition, but because our troops are in Afghanistan.
Hoh's doubts about the U.S. mission in Afghanistan crystallized with his experience in the Korengal Valley near the border with Pakistan. Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff had asked during a visit to Afghanistan what U.S. forces were doing there after noticing that a number of Americans had been killed. Hoh was assigned to answer his question.
What he found was that there was no reason for Americans to be in that valley and that the insurgents had shown up mainly after U.S. forces arrived.
That, he says, taught him "how localized the insurgency was. ... I thought it was nationalistic. But it's localism. I would call it valley-ism." In the end, Hoh concluded that the war has "pitted the urban, secular, educated and modern of Afghanistan against the rural, religious, illiterate and traditional. It is this latter group that composes and supports the Pashtun insurgency." If he is right, that essentially puts U.S. forces in the middle of a civil war. And it poses a problem for President Obama. For while much attention has been given to how the Afghan war can or should be prosecuted and whether more troops should be sent there, Hoh raises a more fundamental question that the president needs to answer: What are we doing there?
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