Matthew Hoh Speaks Grim Truth To Power

[laststeamtrain]

Roger Morris and George Kenney

(Roger Morris and George Kenney are both Foreign Service Officers who resigned on principle -- Morris at the 1970 invasion of Cambodia, Kenney in 1991 over policy in the Balkans.)

Posted: November 27, 2009 09:44 PM

Matthew Hoh Speaks Grim Truth To Power

The rare resignation on principle is always telling in American government. When Matthew Hoh recently left the State Department -- a Marine Captain in Iraq who became a diplomat in Afghanistan -- his act was significant far beyond the first reports.

Hoh speaks grim truth to power. His message is that to pursue the Afghan war policy in any guise -- regardless of the troop level President Obama now chooses -- will be utter folly, trapping America in an unwinnable civil war in the Hindu Kush, and only fueling terrorism.

<snip>

Most telling may be the disparity between Hoh -- the serious student of Afghan culture -- and Washington's decision-makers. To deal with one of the most complex settings on earth, the Obama administration relies on key figures -- Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Defense Secretary Robert Gates, Af-Pak Special envoy Richard Holbrooke and NSC Advisor James Jones -- whose careers in politics or the bureaucracy (like those commanding generals David Petraeus and Stanley McChrystal) are bereft of any substantive knowledge of a people they are supposed to master. It leaves them all dangerously dependent on staff, and prey to the absence of dissenters like Hoh among aides whose credentials are hardly more impressive than their own.

That intellectual vacuum, a mirror of Vietnam decision-making, explains the shock and hostility that greeted recent cables of US Ambassador Karl Eikenberry opposing added U.S. troops backing an irredeemable regime. As Hoh exemplifies, actual knowledge of Afghanistan is rare -- and the lack scarcely recognized -- in a war council prone to flippant lines like Clinton's recent "There are warlords and there are warlords," or Holbrooke's definition of success, "We'll know it when we see it."

At the heart of Washington's decision-making dysfunction, of course, is always a president in thrall to the hoary fears and myths of national security, the most important realm he governs and in which most take power least prepared. For Barack Obama, only historic courage and insight can surmount the multiple corruptions of policy he is heir to.

Hoh embodies that bravery. Implored by Eikenberry to stay, he chose to forgo a prized career to speak out. We know that agony. There is no easy course ahead in Afghanistan. US policies a half century before 2001 account for much of the politics now so deplored in Kabul, a breakdown inflicted as well as inherent, and a blood debt added to the toll of occupation and war.

<more>

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/roger-morris/matthew-hoh-speaks-grim-t_b_372528.html

[snagglepuss]

1. K&R thanks for posting nt

[Greyhound]

2. Exactly. K&R.

[paulsby]

3. excellent article

thank you for posting this. very informative

[midnight]

4. We need a miracle to bring this mess to an end. End this and bring them home.

[spiritual_gunfighter]

5. Thank you for posting this

If anyone knows the folly that is escalation in Afghanistan, it is Hoh. I just wish Obama, Holbrooke, Gates and Clinton would listen more to people like Hoh and less to each other.