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Title: U.S. official resigns over Afghan war
Source:
Washington Post
URL Source: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dy ... id=topnews&sid=ST2009102603447
Published: Oct 27, 2009
Author: Karen DeYoung
Post Date: 2009-10-27 10:23:51 by noone222
Keywords: None
Views: 200
Comments: 15
By Karen DeYoung Washington Post Staff Writer Tuesday, October 27, 2009 When Matthew Hoh joined the Foreign Service early this year, he was exactly the kind of smart civil-military hybrid the administration was looking for to help expand its development efforts in Afghanistan. A former Marine Corps captain with combat experience in Iraq, Hoh had also served in uniform at the Pentagon, and as a civilian in Iraq and at the State Department. By July, he was the senior U.S. civilian in Zabul province, a Taliban hotbed. But 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. Although he said his time in Zabul was the "second-best job I've ever had," his dominant experience is from the Marines, where many of his closest friends still serve. "There are plenty of dudes who need to be killed," he said of al-Qaeda and the Taliban. "I was never more happy than when our Iraq team whacked a bunch of guys." But many Afghans, he wrote in his resignation letter, are fighting the United States largely because its troops are there -- a growing military presence in villages and valleys where outsiders, including other Afghans, are not welcome and where the corrupt, U.S.-backed national government is rejected. While the Taliban is a malign presence, and Pakistan-based al-Qaeda needs to be confronted, he said, the United States is asking its troops to die in Afghanistan for what is essentially a far-off civil war. As the White House deliberates over whether to deploy more troops, Hoh said he decided to speak out publicly because "I want people in Iowa, people in Arkansas, people in Arizona, to call their congressman and say, 'Listen, I don't think this is right.' " "I realize what I'm getting into . . . what people are going to say about me," he said. "I never thought I would be doing this." 'Uncommon bravery' Hoh's journey -- from Marine, reconstruction expert and diplomat to war protester -- was not an easy one. Over the weeks he spent thinking about and drafting his resignation letter, he said, "I felt physically nauseous at times." His first ambition in life was to become a firefighter, like his father. Instead, after graduation from Tufts University and a desk job at a publishing firm, he joined the Marines in 1998. After five years in Japan and at the Pentagon -- and at a point early in the Iraq war when it appeared to many in the military that the conflict was all but over -- he left the Marines to join the private sector, only to be recruited as a Defense Department civilian in Iraq. A trained combat engineer, he was sent to manage reconstruction efforts in Saddam Hussein's home town of Tikrit. "At one point," Hoh said, "I employed up to 5,000 Iraqis" handing out tens of millions of dollars in cash to construct roads and mosques. His program was one of the few later praised as a success by the U.S. special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction. In 2005, Hoh took a job with BearingPoint, a major technology and management contractor at the State Department, and was sent to the Iraq desk in Foggy Bottom. When the U.S. effort in Iraq began to turn south in early 2006, he was recalled to active duty from the reserves. He assumed command of a company in Anbar province, where Marines were dying by the dozens. Hoh came home in the spring of 2007 with citations for what one Marine evaluator called "uncommon bravery," a recommendation for promotion, and what he later recognized was post-traumatic stress disorder. Of all the deaths he witnessed, the one that weighed most heavily on him happened in a helicopter crash in Anbar in December 2006. He and a friend, Maj. Joseph T. McCloud, were aboard when the aircraft fell into the rushing waters below Haditha dam. Hoh swam to shore, dropped his 90 pounds of gear and dived back in to try to save McCloud and three others he could hear calling for help. He was a strong swimmer, he said, but by the time he reached them, "they were gone." 'You can't sleep' It wasn't until his third month home, in an apartment in Arlington, that it hit him like a wave. "All the things you hear about how it comes over you, it really did. . . . You have dreams, you can't sleep. You're just, 'Why did I fail? Why didn't I save that man? Why are his kids growing up without a father?' " Like many Marines in similar situations, he didn't seek help. "The only thing I did," Hoh said, "was drink myself blind." What finally began to bring him back, he said, was a television show -- "Rescue Me" on the FX cable network -- about a fictional New York firefighter who descended into "survivor guilt" and alcoholism after losing his best friend in the World Trade Center attacks. He began talking to friends and researching the subject online. He visited McCloud's family and "apologized to his wife . . . because I didn't do enough to save them," even though his rational side knew he had done everything he could. Hoh represented the service at the funeral of a Marine from his company who committed suicide after returning from Iraq. "My God, I was so afraid they were going to be angry," he said of the man's family. "But they weren't. All they did was tell me how much he loved the Marine Corps." It's something I'll carry for the rest of my life," he said of his Iraq experiences. "But it's something I've settled, I've reconciled with." Late last year, a friend told Hoh that the State Department was offering year-long renewable hires for Foreign Service officers in Afghanistan. It was a chance, he thought, to use the development skills he had learned in Tikrit under a fresh administration that promised a new strategy. 'Valley-ism' In photographs he brought home from Afghanistan, Hoh appears as a tall young man in civilian clothes, with a neatly trimmed beard and a pristine flak jacket. He stands with Eikenberry, the ambassador, on visits to northern Kunar province and Zabul, in the south. He walks with Zabul Gov. Mohammed Ashraf Naseri, confers with U.S. military officers and sits at food-laden meeting tables with Afghan tribal leaders. In one picture, taken on a desolate stretch of desert on the Pakistani border, he poses next to a hand-painted sign in Pashto marking the frontier. The border picture was taken in early summer, after he arrived in Zabul following two months in a civilian staff job at the military brigade headquarters in Jalalabad, in eastern Afghanistan. It was in Jalalabad that his doubts started to form. Hoh was assigned to research the response to a question asked by Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, during an April visit. Mullen wanted to know why the U.S. military had been operating for years in the Korengal Valley, an isolated spot near Afghanistan's eastern border with Pakistan where a number of Americans had been killed. Hoh concluded that there was no good reason. The people of Korengal didn't want them; the insurgency appeared to have arrived in strength only after the Americans did, and the battle between the two forces had achieved only a bloody stalemate. Korengal and other areas, he said, taught him "how localized the insurgency was. I didn't realize that a group in this valley here has no connection with an insurgent group two kilometers away." Hundreds, maybe thousands, of groups across Afghanistan, he decided, had few ideological ties to the Taliban but took its money to fight the foreign intruders and maintain their own local power bases. "That's really what kind of shook me," he said. "I thought it was more nationalistic. But it's localism. I would call it valley-ism."
Poster Comment: Good !!!
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#1. To: noone222 (#0)
Big ups to a good man.
Indeed. But my hopes for M.E. sanity diminish daily as this good young man gives up on the BO administration and every time I turn on the tube I see another R waving the bloody flag. From whence comes our help?
Obama is in so far over his head he should be wearing skuba gear .... The Iman
..."We want to have some kind of governance there, and we have some obligation for it not to be a bloodbath," Hoh said. "But you have to draw the line somewhere, and say this is their problem to solve."... ... American families, he said at the end of the letter, "must be reassured their dead have sacrificed for a purpose worthy of futures lost, love vanished, and promised dreams unkept. I have lost confidence such assurances can be made any more."... Home run! I hope the dolts in Congress and the WH pay heed to this young man's insights. He couldn't have drawn a clearer picture for them to understand the situation.
maybe this guy could replace one of the "dolts" !
The U.S. Govt has become a tyrannical butcher; U.S. taxpayers are accomplices to international murder and mayhem. If you satisfy your fears by bowing to this butcher, you forfeit your humanity and possibly your soul.
Answer: We the People need to follow Hoh's advice - this why he went public: "I want people in Iowa, people in Arkansas, people in Arizona, to call their congressman and say, 'Listen, I don't think this is right.' "
Kinda like the 13 American colonies felt about British troops in 1776?? What great irony, too bad those self-righteous, pompous, blood-thirsty bastards in D.C. are blind to our own history.
_________________________________________________________________________ Good question. I believe that the answer is TIME. This stew was cooked up by more than one chef. A host of factions created this war, and they all have competing and conflicting interests. Like the coming "health care" debacle, this war is directed by competing cliques all with their own purses in play and they all want something different out of it. Sooner or later, this will end in disaster. The masses of men in uniform required to turn Afghanistan into a functioning pariamentary democracy where men have the same reverence for elected representatives as they do for familial satraps and warrior chieftans would be gigantic. All the mullets in this land of ours would have to be conscripted and be sent over there to stand on the necks of those folks for a generation. We're screwed. And as much as I hate to say that, given the cost, it's the only thing that gives me hope. When you have butchers like McChrystal and the weenies in the 'Bama administration at each other's throats, the prospects for this effort over the long term are not good. Open up the hatch on the embassy roof and warm up the choppers.
This article is a keeper! Click on the url provided by noone222 and read the full text in its entirety. Pass it on to friends and family and have them call their Congressmen and Senators per Hoh's request [ the subject of this article].
right on...this is one instance where i'd like to see a deja vu.
You really want to stand by that????
View the situation as it really is, militarily. You are the field commander, I give you the job and state profuse times...THERE WILL BE NO WITHDRAWAL... As commander you can do two things, stagnate, hunker down, do nothing, try not getting killed and watch the situation deteriorate...OR... You can request more troops in an attempt to escalate and at least stay even, without winning or losing, but you want me to state which is ordered, stagnate or escalate. Being sly, I tell you nothing, leave you dangling. Bad place to be.
Done intentionally, so the public will make up Obama's mind for him. Now, if anyone doesn't think this is going thru the kids heads who are in country, they'd be crazy. They were and are cannon fodder, as all soldiers are.
Obummer has tried to make McChrystal the fall guy, no matter how things turn out. McChrystal has now put Obumski in a position whereby he MUST say stagnate, do nothing, or escalate, dont lose. Either way it will be his decision not the military. I suspect Obumskis owners never anticipated being put in the corner.
I wasn't there, but I've read numerous reports that this man was reponsible for torture centers all across Iraq, was associated with assassination squads around the globe, and ran Special Forces operations in Iraq in which countless civilian were killed. He is also said to have hand a the Tillman coverup. Tillman's parents want general's record reviewed I don't like these men, and I don't like their wars. Whatever McChrystal does or doesn't do is uninteresting to me. If he doesn't do what is required of him, he will be replaced by another bloodsoaked martinet.
It should be. In the military, most are given thankless jobs to do, legal or illegal, moral or immoral. I use to think about what we were expected to do, murder and maim 250,000 human beings in the twinkling of an eye. Within five seconds an entire city gone. Is that illegal and or immoral???? Had the bell rung to go, which we always dreaded thinking about, would I have refused to go???? Would you??? Or would we do our part in killing a quarter million people????
#2. To: Lod (#1)
(Edited)
Big ups to a good man.
#3. To: noone222 (#0)
But many Afghans, he wrote in his resignation letter, are fighting the United States largely because its troops are there -- a growing military presence in villages and valleys where outsiders, including other Afghans, are not welcome and where the corrupt, U.S.-backed national government is rejected. While the Taliban is a malign presence, and Pakistan-based al-Qaeda needs to be confronted, he said, the United States is asking its troops to die in Afghanistan for what is essentially a far-off civil war...
#4. To: scrapper2 (#3)
Home run! I hope the dolts in Congress and the WH pay heed to this young man's insights.
#5. To: iconoclast, All (#2)
From whence comes our help?
#6. To: noone222 (#0)
But many Afghans, he wrote in his resignation letter, are fighting the United States largely because its troops are there...
"This man is Jesus,” shouted one man, spilling his Guinness as Barack Obama began his inaugural address. “When will he come to Kenya to save us?”
-Schweizerische Schuetzenzeitung (Swiss Shooting Federation) April, 1941
#7. To: iconoclast (#2)
From whence comes our help?
#8. To: ghostdogtxn, christine, Jethro Tull, mirage, Horse, TwentyTwelve, Brian S, Phant2000, wudidiz, Hayek Fan, farmfriend, Cynicom, your_neighbor, tom007, Lod, abraxas, TooConservative, All (#0)
#9. To: randge (#7)
Open up the hatch on the embassy roof and warm up the choppers.
#10. To: randge (#7)
When you have butchers like McChrystal
#11. To: randge (#7)
#12. To: Cynicom (#11)
Being sly, I tell you nothing, leave you dangling. Bad place to be.
#13. To: Jethro Tull (#12)
#14. To: Cynicom (#10)
You really want to stand by that????
#15. To: randge (#14)
Whatever McChrystal does or doesn't do is uninteresting to me.
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