For It’s 1, 2,3 It’s Not Worth Fighting For
Never mind the 14 dead U.S. servicemen from two downed choppers in Afghanistan two days ago. It is the whole stinking nebulous sack of undefined victory scenario that must be questioned. And a hearty Semper Fi to this former Marine that said enough.
U.S. Official Resigns Over Afghan War
Foreign Service officer and former Marine captain says he no longer knows why his nation is fighting
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.
Fueling the insurgency. We aren’t ending the insurgency, we are causing it to grow.
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.”
I am just a blue collar guy trying to figure it all out and I should take comfort in the fact that somebody with much more experience, insight and connections can’t figure out why and to what end either. But I don’t. It just makes me sad and mad that it continues.
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.
But…are these the words of some whacked out peacenik, pot-smoking hippie that wants everybody to be in love?
“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.”
Sounds like a good old red meat-eating former U.S. Marine to me. Maybe somebody should listen to this guy. Maybe more should speak up and say what he is saying. Maybe then some sanity will set in and we can extricate ourselves from this no-win situation GW Bush put us in.
Maybe. I hope so.
