US Official Resigns Over Afghan War

Posted by | October 27, 2009 12:06 | Filed under: Top Stories


Matthew Hoh, the senior US official in Taliban-infested Zabul province, is the first American official to resign over the Afghan war.

 

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.

 

In September he wrote a letter to the State Department’s head of personnel.

 

“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.”

 

Hoh is not exactly a pot-smoking hippie:


“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.”

 

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.

 

Hoh says we should reduce forces in Afghanistan and focus more on Pakistan.

Click here for reuse options!
Copyright 2009 Liberaland
By: Alan

Alan Colmes is the publisher of Liberaland.

Leave a Reply