Basic Truths in Hoh Resignation Letter Were True When He Took His Job

I'm pretty pissed off right now.

It makes less than zero sense to me that Matthew Hoh's resignation as "the senior U.S. civilian in Zabul province" seems to be swaying sensible people from Christopher Buckley to Garrison Keillor to Andrew Sullivan. We all, naturally, have heard of Zabul province. We all, naturally, had heard of Matthew Hoh long before the Washington Post wrote up his resignation Tuesday. Our hopes for Afghanistan, our sense that the war there might be salvageable hinged mostly on the confidence we felt knowing that Hoh was there in Zabul province representing us. Right? Well, we're sure acting like it.

Am I pissed because I want this war, because I love this war? Absolutely not. As I wrote last November for the Huffington Post, I want a goddamn time machine. I want to go back to 9/12/01 and write and plead and shriek and march in the streets and hand out books about the fate of foreign armies in Afghanistan. I want to generally do whatever it would have taken to shake our shell-shocked nation from the delusion that an invasion and occupation would catch bin Laden and make us safer. But we don't get a time machine.

I mention my piece from last November for reasons other than self-aggrandizement. Rather, the opposite: to remind you that it didn't take some genius with super-duper-secret info to notice just how serious a mess we've been facing in Afghanistan. And that may sum up why I'm so pissed. The basic grim truths that Hoh wrote about in his much-quoted resignation letter were all basically true when he took his job a few months ago.

The situation was awful. The situation had been awful. The situation is awful. Pure damned-if-we-stay-damned-if-we-go awfulness.

This is probably why Richard Holbrooke, the top U.S. envoy to the region, told the Post for that same Tuesday article that "I agreed with much of (Hoh's) analysis."

If you've been paying attention, Hoh's analysis should basically provoke a "Well, yeah. No shit. What are we supposed to do about it?"

Read through the excellent interviews that accompanied the recent PBS Frontline episode about Afghanistan. Read those and tell me there's some obvious path, some magic bullet, some means of unscathed escape. Don't have time to read all ten of the interviews? Fine. Just read the Andrew Bacevich interview and the Steve Coll interview.

As Andrew Exum wrote Tuesday, "I know about 50 really smart people on Afghanistan with lots of time on the ground there, and no two have the same opinion about what U.S. policy should be. Let's not turn one dude whose opinions on Afghanistan happen to line up with the zeitgeist into the flippin' Delphic oracle."

Lest anyone bristle at the "one dude" line, I should point out that Exum, a veteran of Afghanistan and Iraq, also referred to Iraq vet Hoh as "talented and patriotic."

Getting out of Afghanistan seems clearly to have been the right thing for Hoh personally. I continue, though, to believe what I wrote earlier this month in my most recent HuffPost piece:

"It fundamentally harms the long-term cause of global peace if America permits itself to move through history in a remorseless, irresponsible cycle wherein a Bush-type leader launches reckless wars and an Obama-type leader yanks our troops out. No matter how much we want our troops home, it is immoral to throw a country into chaos and then walk away simply because we grow weary of that chaos."

Wordy, I know. But I hope you'll slog through those two sentences and think about the underlying ideas. I hope you will think about the ideas of people who've earned the right to have their opinions considered much more carefully than mine: Exum, Coll, Bacevich, Rory Stewart, Michael Semple, this Air Force officer stationed in Afghanistan.

And Hoh.

Yes Hoh.

Absolutely Hoh.

Hoh was right to go public with his profound misgivings. His conscience called him to do so. But our consciences call upon us to think hard about this. All of this. Maybe harder than we've ever thought about a decision faced by our government. Partly because this deserves our careful consideration. Partly because if we think about it long enough, we may at least dimly remember this mess of an occupation when -- inevitably -- terrorists strike again and some swaggering fool of a president tells us we need to conquer a troubled country to make ourselves safe.

Huffington Post blogger David Quigg lives in Seattle. This piece originally appeared on his personal blog. His Twitter feed is here.

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UPDATE (10/30/09)

Wednesday, during a Washington Post online chat that I didn't see until almost a full day after I wrote this post, a reader from D.C. asked Hoh about the same basic idea I put in my headline here. The exchange went like this:

Washington, D.C.: Shouldn't you have known before going to Afghanistan that the war was pretty intractable? I mean, the history of the country is clear. What new information did you learn that so completely changed your mind about U.S. involvement there?

Matthew Hoh: I did study quite a bit and I spoke to many friends and colleagues who had previously served in Afghanistan. I did have concerns about the endstate of our goals in Afghanistan, but also felt the need to contribute and to continue to serve. Upon arriving in Afghanistan and serving in both the East and the South (and particularly speaking with local Afghans), I found that the majority of those who were fighting us and the Afghan central government were fighting us because they felt occupied. This concurred with history I had read and with what colleagues had told me.

Now, I may be reading Hoh's words through a filter. But there's nothing in his response to the Post reader that makes me rethink what I asserted above: "Basic Truths in Hoh Resignation Letter Were True When He Took His Job."

Comments

[Will2568]

In his resignation letter, Mr. Hoh addresses the nuclear threat posed by instability and insurgency in Pakistan, in large part due to our military presence in Afghanistan. In my opinion, that's the elephant in the room that too many of us are ignoring. If we don't want the nuclear annihilation of countless millions of our fellow human beings, we must do NOTHING which would further destabilize Pakistan.

[RogerHWerner]

Ultimately, what Hoh thinks, what Basevich thinks what Quigg thinks, what I think, and what anyone reading this thinks posting thinks about the Afghan War is ultimately irrelevant. ALL...all that really matters is what the people of Afghanistan want. If the majority of the Afghan people want US assistance, than I would agree that Colin Powell's pottery barn anaology is applicable: We broke Afghanistan and so we have an obligation to work with the Afghan people to fix what we broke. If however, the majority of the Afghan people want us gone than we must respect those wishes least we make a mockery of national sovereignty (as if we haven't already done that numerous times pervious). If we do leave Afghanistan at the request of it's people however, we need to make it crystal clear to them that if the country becomes a haven for terrorists we'll be back.

[LADawson]

Well, the first thing that came to my mind was that maybe Mr. Hoh thought he could make a difference when he took the job. We're all hopeful when facing a new and interesting challenge. Then, when he finally came to see the full picture of just how ridiculous us occupying Afghanistan is, he decided to cut his losses and walk away. Which is probably the smartest move at this point. I really don't see what we can hope to accomplish in the future that we couldn't have made a significant move toward in 9 years, but we've gotten pretty much nowhere. How many lessons from history are we going to fail to pay attention to before we give up wasting our money, and worst of all, our people?

[RogerHWerner]

We let this war fester because Bush/Cheney dropped the ball in favor of a higher profile target. The ultimate destiny of Afghanistan, with a tribal society is with its people not the US military. Afghan society is alien to Americans and sadly our government. We had justification for invasion--­maybe--but we're past that issue today. What America must establish is the will of the Afghans not their corrupt puppet government. How this can happen is hard to know as we can't trust the Afghan government. We might commission a national referendum but then can we protect Afghans from Taliban retribution? Whatever. The unsustainability of current policy is clear and we need to clean house beginning with McChrystal since he seems incapable of dealing with a numerically smaller and lesser equipped enemy, which to my mind demonstrates the wrongheadedness of US policy: If we can't beat a poorly equipped force with a 12 to 1 advantage, I can't imagine how increasing that to 15 to 1 is going to change the outcome.

[Will2568]

The ratios you've cited are based on what? In a predominantly rural theater like Afghanistan with an estimated population of 28 million, assuming the basic strategy is counter-insurgency where the goal is to "win hearts and minds," you'd need somewhere between 500,000 and 700,000 pairs of boots on the ground to get the job done.

We had absolutely no justification for invasion, no maybe about it. At most we had justification for covert insertion of special forces to infiltrate and disrupt terrorist networks. That job was done, and now al Qaeda has adapted so that it no longer needs sympathetic regimes such as the taliban to provide safe haven.

If you didn't hear Mr. Hoh's interview on NPR's All Things Considered yesterday, I highly recommend it. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=114287485

[allonfla]

"No matter how much we want our troops home, it is immoral to throw a country into chaos and then walk away simply because we grow weary of that chaos" - Not enough people talk of this, thanks.