Captain Hoh Decided To Go

In my blog ‘Wake Up Americans!’ (http://www.chowk.com/ilogs/74218/30139) I expressed the hope that good Americans need to rise to the occasion to condemn this ficticious GWOT just like the brave Iraqi journalist who despatched his priceless shoe in GWB’s evil direction. An insane Green-Cardigan at Chowq commented as follows:

“..pakis do not wake up despite american drones, american soldiers on their land. How can tahir expect americans just by a stupid ilog?”

Well that ‘stupid’ i-log may have been read in that new Vietnam called Afghanistan by a Foreign Service officer (and former Marine captain) who wondered aloud: ‘I no longer know why my nation is fighting’.

Our new hero’s name is Matthew Hoh, who joined the Foreign Service in early 2009. The administration thought he was exactly the kind of smart civil-military hybrid they were looking for to help expand its ‘development’ efforts in new-Vietnam. While in the land of the pure, there is no shortage of wonder-boys (with ‘admin-experience’) in various ‘bloody civilian’ departments, it had to be Capt. Hoh to break the vicious American chain.

Our man, an ex-Marine with combat experience in Iraq, served in uniform at the Pentagon, as a civilian in Iraq and at the State Department. By July 2009, at age 36, he became a senior U.S. civilian in Zabul province, a Taliban stronghold. Hoh is the first U.S. official known to resign in protest over the Afghan war. His conviction was unshakeable: American invasion simply fueled the insurgency. He stated in a four-page letter to the department's head of personnel:

“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.”

The dried up American Dream reacted immeditaley to Hoh's letter. Senior U.S. officials, worried that they would lose a fine officer to the critcis, begged him to stay. U.S. Ambassador Karl W. Eikenberry had Hoh flown to Kabul and offered him a job on his senior embassy staff. Hoh, a man with a conscience, declined, and was flown back to the land of home re-possessions and bankruptcies 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 but not with his conclusion that the war ‘wasn't worth the fight’”.

Needless to say but Halbrooke is paid to utter such things for the mass consumption of the American media.

Halbrooke 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?”

The last few ‘political impacts’ certain important American buildings faced were the Pentagon Montessori and the Twin Towers—but did anything change?

Hoh, a good soul, reluctantly accepted the argument and the job, but realised a week later that it was all desgined to neutralise him. “I recognize the career implications, but it wasn't the right thing to do,” he said in an interview, 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.

“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, the United States is asking its troops to die in Afghanistan for what is essentially a far-off civil war.”
The rising death toll in Afghanistan will destroy the pro-war public confidence in the conduct and purpose of the war, and Hoh has questioned the system by resigning.

"I didn't realise that a group in this valley here has no connection with an insurgent group two kilometres away. Many Afghans were fighting only because foreign troops are in their country,” Hoh told the Washington Post.

He said there were hundreds, perhaps, thousands of such groups across Afghanistan, most with few ideological ties to the Taliban but resistant to foreign troops. "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."
He 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 urge all Americans to heed the advice of their own man if not mine.

Read other ARTICLES and BLOGS by the author. The reason he is frequently banned on Chowq is because he (1) posts rebuttals to anti-Islam atheists (2) counters their anti-Pakistan propaganda effieciently (3)shows them how the American ‘wet dream’ is drying up globally (4) opposes their sponsored 'favourite' writers’ debauched views, and satirizes them

Some of my patented definitions:

GWOT: George W’s Oily Terrorism

Green-Cardigan: a Green Card holder who has kicked this country in the face and gone away to settle abroad in the cause of the greenback.