By Alan Z. Forman
As President Obama wrestles with a request from his Afghanistan commander Stanley McChrystal to send significantly more on-the-ground troops into an increasingly deadly conflict, a major defection by a top diplomatic official who characterized the eight-year effort as aimless has added to an escalating chorus of criticism regarding the war.
Whether or not that criticism is warranted remains open to question.
Charging that the U.S. military has been “inadequately prepared and resourced” to effectively combat the insurgency in Afghanistan, it was revealed this past week that America’s “senior civilian representative” in Zabul Province resigned in protest early in September, expressing serious “doubts and reservations” about the probability of any long-term American success in the region.
Comparing U.S. support for what he termed Afghanistan's “invalid and illegitimate” government, to American “involvement” with South Vietnam in the late 1960s and early '70s, the former diplomat, a 36-year-old ex-Marine combat engineer who insists he's not “some peacenik, pot-smoking hippie” — a reference to the counterculture 40 years ago that fueled the antiwar movement which helped end the first war America ever lost — says he is one who believes, referring to al-Qaeda and the Taliban, that “there are plenty of dudes who need to be killed.”
In an eloquent, hard-hitting yet ultimately respectful letter of resignation, Matthew P. Hoh, a decorated former Marine Corps captain who fought in Iraq and earlier this year joined the U.S. Foreign Service, told Ambassador Nancy J. Powell, the Director General of the Foreign Service and Director of Human Resources in the State Department, that in the course of his five months' service as a diplomat in a Taliban stronghold in Afghanistan he has “lost understanding of and confidence in the strategic purposes of the United States' presence” there, adding that he has serious doubts and reservations about current U.S. strategy and “planned future strategy” in the region.
As such, he called on the Obama Administration to pull out the troops and cancel this country's military involvement in Afghanistan for good.
Others in the military have suggested that Hoh may be overreacting. They point out that America has troops all around the world, many of whom have remained as peacekeepers in countries against which we waged war more than a half-century ago. Most prominent in this list are Germany, Japan and Korea, where the United States has maintained peacekeeping forces since the Korean Conflict of the 1950s and the end of World War II.
These soldiers and sailors, many of whom are now retired, as well as those currently serving on active duty, see an American responsibility as the world's only superpower in the wake of the Soviet Union collapse and the decline of the former British Empire, to make every effort possible to maintain stability in troubled sectors of the world, including Afghanistan and the entire Middle East, areas that pose a constant threat to the United States via their support of terrorist organizations such as al-Qaeda.
America and the world learned a hard lesson following World War I — that it's suicide to be isolationist — and that, like it or not, we cannot divorce ourselves from the rest of the world. In 2009 America is the only superpower, with all the concomitant advantages — and problems — that go along with that designation.
Major figures have called on the United States in the past to divorce itself from the problems of the world; Charles Lindbergh springs immediately to mind. In the years leading up to World War II Lindbergh was an outspoken critic of America’s involvement in world conflict and was a leader of the antiwar America First movement.
He was not a war veteran however and never held a diplomatic post like Matthew Hoh.
First to quit in protest
According to the Washington Post, as reported in its Oct. 27 editions, Hoh is the first U.S. official known to have quit in protest to the Afghan war. Characterizing the conflict in his resignation letter (which was effective Oct. 21) as essentially a “35-year-old civil war,” Hoh told the Post he had come to the conclusion that Afghans resent the presence of U.S. troops in their country and are fighting — not for ideological reasons — but simply to drive the unwanted American soldiers out.
Hoh served slightly less than half of his one-year Foreign Service assignment to Zabul Province before resigning in protest and was not a career diplomat, unlike several long-serving State Department officials who resigned during the administrations of George W. Bush and Bill Clinton to protest the invasion of Iraq and U.S. policies in Bosnia.
State Department spokesperson Ian Kelly told reporters last week at a Washington news briefing: “We take his point of view very seriously, but we continue to believe that we're on track to achieving the goal that the president has set before us,” adding that “it's a very, very difficult job that we have out there in a very complicated situation, but it's definitely worth the effort”; however, “we respect his right to dissent.”
The State Department respects Hoh’s views, Kelly added, but emphasized that it does not agree with them.
Still, a number of senior administration officials urged Hoh not to leave, including the president's special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, Richard C. Holbrooke, and the United States ambassador to Afghanistan, Karl W. Eikenberry, a retired U.S. Army lieutenant general.
Holbrooke told the Post that while he didn't share Hoh's view that the war isn't worth the fight or that “we are mortgaging our nation's economy on a war, which, even with increased commitment, will remain a draw for years to come” as Hoh alleges, Holbrooke said: “I agreed with much of his analysis.”
Many of Hoh's opinions also are shared by a significant number of Americans who have been in the Afghan and Iraqi regions, both military and civilian. They too question whether the United States can ever achieve a favorable democratic outcome in a nation that continues to resist having democracy forced upon it.
“Success and victory, whatever they may be, will be realized not in years, after billions more [are] spent, but in decades and generations. The United States does not enjoy a national treasury for such success and victory,” Hoh emphasized in his letter, quoting an unidentified American commander as saying: “We are spending ourselves into oblivion” in a futile effort.
“Like the Soviets” (who spent nine fruitless years attempting to solve the Afghan problem, and have a history, along with the British, of failed doctrine in that country dating back to the 19th century), “we continue to secure and bolster a failing state, while encouraging an ideology and system of government unknown and unwanted” by its people.
We can no longer claim that our dead servicepeople “have sacrificed for a purpose worthy of futures lost, love vanished, and promised dreams unkept,” Hoh wrote in his resignation letter to Ambassador Powell, which was submitted Sept. 10 but not released to the public until last week. The Washington Post published the four-page letter in its entirety.
Specious reasons
Characterizing the U.S. and NATO presence and operations in Afghanistan as “an occupation force against which the insurgency is justified” and asserting that American “backing of the Afghan government in its current form continues to distance the government from its people,” Hoh wrote in his letter: “I find specious the reasons we ask for bloodshed and sacrifice from our young men and women in Afghanistan.”
In both Regional Commands East and South in Afghanistan “I have observed that the bulk of the insurgency fights not for the white banner of the Taliban, but rather against the presence of foreign soldiers and taxes imposed by an unrepresentative government in Kabul” (Afghanistan's capital), he said.
Citing “glaring corruption and unabashed graft,” along with “a President [Hamid Karzai, the 12th president of Afghanistan, who took office in December 2004 and is currently participating in a runoff election scheduled to take place Saturday (Nov. 7) to decide the result of the 2009 presidential voting] whose confidants and chief advisers comprise drug lords and war crimes villains,” Hoh noted that American “support for this kind of government, coupled with a misunderstanding of the insurgency's true nature,” reminds him “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,” concluding that “our presence in Afghanistan has only increased destabilization and insurgency in Pakistan where we rightly fear a toppled or weakened Pakistani government may lose control of its nuclear weapons.”
In effect, he concludes that the Afghan insurgency as well is being fueled by the presence of American troops.
In essence, Hoh told the Obama Administration that he considers the Afghan war to be a flawed, failed, no-win conflict as well as a sinkhole for billions of American dollars plus a potential deathtrap for huge numbers of U.S. troops, all to prop up an unpopular, corrupt, dope-profiteering regime.
Afghans are basically a 9th century tribal people who support and are controlled by local warlords, such as al-Qaeda, the Taliban and others who follow an age-old pattern of stealing from neighboring tribes. Installed as America’s puppet, Karzai has governed in the only way he knows how: tribally. And most Afghans who complain about his corruption do so only because they themselves are not benefiting from it. Bottom line: The presence of U.S. troops constrains the Afghans from reverting back to their traditional ways.
Much the same was true of the conflict between the U.S. government and American Indian tribes, who took to the warpath against the United States in the 19th century. Mistreatment and betrayal of the Native Americans notwithstanding, the Indians sought to retain their traditional ways, one of which was making war on their neighbors.
The insurgency in Afghanistan is similarly “localized,” according to Hoh. A group of insurgents in one area has virtually no connection with an insurgent group several miles away; hence they practice not nationalism but localism, he says. Of the hundreds of insurgent groups, “the majority” are residents with “loyalties to their families, villages, valleys and to their financial supporters.”
"Plus-up" of forces
One American soldier, speaking on condition of anonymity, who has been on the ground in both Afghanistan and Iraq and fully expects to be deployed again if the president ultimately decides to grant what the soldier terms the “plus-up” of forces being requested by Obama’s Afghanistan commander, told Investigative Voice he questions: “What do we want from this war? What is to be the mission of the increased forces? How much of a difference is the plus-up of soldiers going to create?”
Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the Army's Commander of American and NATO forces in Afghanistan — the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) — has asked the president to send 30,000 to 40,000 additional troops to the region, an increase Obama has said he needs considerably more time to contemplate before making a decision.
Former Vice President Dick Cheney has accused the White House of dragging its feet over the decision: “It's time for President Obama to .... stop dithering while America's armed forces are in danger,” the former VP asserted on Oct. 21, charging that the administration's inaction and indecision — he called it “waffling” — are weakening U.S. stature in the region and emboldening the enemy.
The former U.S. military analyst who leaked the top-secret Pentagon Papers — United States-Vietnam Relations, 1945-1967: A Study Prepared by the Department of Defense — to the New York Times and Washington Post in 1971 at the height of the Vietnam War, Daniel Ellsberg, has alleged that the Air Force drones and what he calls the “death squads” of General McChrystal have had an ultimately negative effect in Afghanistan, causing the growth of an unassailable anti-American resistance. Not even troop numbers comparable to Vietnam-era totals can change that fact, Ellsberg says.
Peak troop strength in Vietnam reached over 540,000 in Spring 1969, most of them American. However, charges by Ellsberg and other antiwar activists that the so-called “domino theory” — a foreign policy hypothesis during the 1950s through 1980s that if one nation in a region came under the influence of communism, then the surrounding countries would follow in a domino effect; that is, they would fall to communism as well — was inherently flawed, are not borne out by historical fact.
Contrary to those charges, many nations in Southeast Asia, including Thailand, Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia, and the Philippines, resisted becoming communist because of the U.S. commitment to South Vietnam.
“Let every nation know,” asserted John F. Kennedy in his inaugural address in 1961, “whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty.”
Kennedy went on to pledge America's “best efforts” to help those countries “strongly supporting their own freedom” and to assist “those people in the huts and villages of half the globe struggling to break the bonds of mass misery” — not because we seek their support, “but because it is right. If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich.”
There are those who would argue that the people of Iraq and Afghanistan are not “struggling to break the bonds of mass misery,” as Kennedy put it, nor is our interest there comparable to our reasons for fighting in Vietnam.
Inadequately prepared and resourced
Antiwar activism aside, a critical issue in Afghanistan involves the focus of the forces on the ground. Hoh's charge that “our leaders, uniformed, civilian and elected, have inadequately prepared and resourced our men and women” being sent to the war zone is cause for serious concern, despite his high praise for the American military:
“Eight years into war, no nation has ever known a more dedicated, well trained, experienced and disciplined military as the U.S. Armed Forces. I do not believe any military force has ever been tasked with such a complex, opaque and Sisyphean mission as the U.S. military has received in Afghanistan. The tactical proficiency and performance of our Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen and Marines is unmatched and unquestioned,” he asserted in his resignation letter.
However, “our forces, devoted and faithful, have been committed to conflict in an indefinite and unplanned manner that has become a cavalier, politically expedient and Pollyannaish misadventure.
“Similarly, the United States has a dedicated and talented cadre of civilians, both U.S. government employees and contractors, who believe in and sacrifice for their mission, but have been ineffectually trained and led with guidance and intent shaped more by the political climate in Washington, D.C. than in Afghan cities, villages, mountains and valleys.”
Ultimately the mission — the military terms it the Mission Essential Task List, or METL — for each unit must be clear. Soldiers must know why they're where they are, what they're expected to do, and have the necessary training to accomplish those objectives. That means not tasking military units with humanitarian missions, for example, without the necessary training to do the job.
“Farmers in the National Guard, for instance — teachers, salespeople, stock brokers, laborers; hash-slingers at Burger King and McDonald's — called up and sent to Afghanistan and Iraq, may well be tasked with figuring out how to get along with the people in those countries they have to interact with,” says one former National Guard soldier who returned two years ago from Iraq and hopes he won't be sent to Afghanistan despite his resolve that, “This is what I signed up for. I can't tell the president where and where not to send me. If I'm needed in Afghanistan then that's where I'll go.
“But if every time I go over there I'm going to be doing something new — such as interacting with Afghan civilians in order to win the 'hearts and minds of the people' — then I need to be trained for that. American soldiers are often dropped into those areas without a METL.”
In other words: Adequate preparation and resources. Doing the task they were trained for and not being expected to carry out new or unrelated missions without full and proper preparation.
The so-called “lesson of Vietnam” was to not get involved in a war without adequate preparation and exit strategy, fighting an enemy more welcome in its homeland than the so-called American liberators. Hoh and others see the same mistake being made in Afghanistan and Iraq.
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Alan Z. Forman is a political scientist (Columbia University), former journalist (Baltimore Sun), and freelance writer/editor. A Navy veteran, he served as Principal Speechwriter for the U.S. Small Business Administrator as well as other presidential appointees, members of Congress and the military, and has been an adjunct professor at Loyola University Maryland plus other academic institutions in the Baltimore metropolitan area.
