US official resigns over Afghan WarForeign Service officer and former Marine captain says he no longer knows why his nation is fighting
The Washington Post: 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... But last month, in a move that has sent ripples all the way to the White House, Hoh, 36, became the first US 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 [.pdf] 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.' [...]
He concluded, he said in his resignation letter, that the war 'has violently and savagely 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.'
With 'multiple, seemingly infinite, local groups,' he wrote, the insurgency 'is fed by what is perceived by the Pashtun people as a continued and sustained assault, going back centuries, on Pashtun land, culture, traditions and religion by internal and external enemies. The US and NATO presence in Pashtun valleys and villages, as well as Afghan army and police units that are led and composed of non-Pashtun soldiers and police, provide and occupation force against which the insurgency is justified.'
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 anymore.'
'The United States military presence in Afghanistan greatly contributes to the legitimacy and strategic message of the Pashtun insurgency. In a like manner our backing of the Afghan government in its current form continues to distance the government from the people. The Afghan government's failings, particularly when weighed against the sacrifice of American lives and dollars, appear legion and metastatic...
'Our support for this kind of government, coupled with a misunderstanding of the insurgency's true nature, reminds me horribly of our involvement with South Vietnam; an unpopular and corrupt government we backed at the expense of our Nation's own internal peace, against an insurgency whose nationalism we arrogantly and ignorantly mistook as a rival to our own Cold War ideology...
'I find specious the reasons we ask for bloodshed and sacrifice from our young men and women in Afghanistan... We are mortgaging our Nation's economy on a war, which even with increased commitment, will remain a draw for years to come. Success and victory, whatever they may be, will be realized not in years, after billions more spent, but in decades and generations. The United States does not enjoy a national treasury for such success and victory.'
'I realize the emotion and tone of my letter and ask you to excuse any ill temper. I trust you understand the nature of this war and the sacrifices made by so many thousands of families who have been separated from loved ones deployed in defense of our Nation and whose homes bear the fractures, upheavals and scars of multiple and compounded deployments. Thousands of our men and women have returned home with physical and mental wounds, some that will never heal or will only worsen with time. The dead return only in bodily form to be received by families who 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 anymore be made. As such, I submit my resignation.'
