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TechnoratiFormer Marine Captain Resigns in Protest of Afghanistan War
Top civilian in Southern province argues we're exacerbating the problem we're supposedly there to solve.
Matthew Hoh, a former Marine captain with combat experience in Iraq, resigned last month from his position with the Foreign Service, where he was the the senior U.S. civilian in the Taliban-dominated Southern Afghanistan province of Zabul, because he became convinced that our war in that country will not only inevitably fail, but is fueling the very insurgency we are trying to defeat. Hoh's resignation is remarkable because it entails the sort of career sacrifice in the name of principle that has been so rare over the last decade, but even more so because of the extraordinary four-page letter (.pdf) he wrote explaining his reasoning.
Hoh's letter should be read in its entirety, but I want to highlight one part. He begins by noting that "next fall, the United States' occupation will equal in length the Soviet Union's own physical involvement in Afghanistan," and contends that our unwanted occupation combined with our support for a deeply corrupt government "reminds [him] horribly of our involvement in South Vietnam." He then explains that most of the people we are fighting are not loyal to the Taliban or driven by any other nefarious aim, but instead are driven principally by resistance to the presence of foreign troops in their provinces and villages (click on image to enlarge):
How
long are we going to continue to do this? We invade and occupy a
country, and then label as "insurgents" or even "terrorists" the people
in that country who fight against our invasion and occupation. With
the most circular logic imaginable, we then insist that we must remain
in order to defeat the "insurgents" and "terrorists" -- largely
composed of people whose only cause for fighting is our presence in
their country. All the while, we clearly exacerbate the very problem
we are allegedly attempting to address -- Terrorism -- by predictably
and inevitably increasing anti-American anger and hatred through our
occupation, which, no matter the strategy, inevitably entails our
killing innocent civilians. Indeed, does Hoh's description of what
drives the insurgency -- anger "against the presence of foreign
soldiers" -- permit the conclusion that that's all going to be placated
with a shift to a kind and gentle counter-insurgency strategy?
Relatedly, Hol points out the transparent fallacy of the claim that we will reduce -- rather than worsen -- the problem of Terrorism by occupying Muslim countries with a massive military presence:
Hoh's observations are entirely consistent with David Rohde's account of his seven-month hostage ordeal with the Taliban: namely, the longer we occupy Afghanistan, the more people we kill and imprison without charges, the greater the central fuel of terrorism -- anti-American hatred -- rises, not only in Afghanistan but across the Muslim world. As the Pentagon's own commissioned Report from 2004 concluded:
Negative attitudes and the conditions that create them are the underlying sources of threats to America's national security . . . Direct American intervention in the Muslim world has paradoxically elevated the stature of and support for Islamic radicals.
Hoh told The Washington Post's Karen DeYoung that he's "not some peacenik, pot-smoking hippie who wants everyone to be in love" and that he believes "there are plenty of dudes who need to be killed," adding: "I was never more happy than when our Iraq team whacked a bunch of guys." Plainly, there's nothing ideological about his conclusions; they're just the by-product of an honest assessment, based on first-hand experiences, of how our ongoing occupation of that country is worsening the very problem we're allegedly there to solve.
28 Comments so far
Show AllGeorge C. Brown - Matthew Hoh nows his history, and now he's been there and is a first hand witness to the real story. We haveno business there and should get our boys and girls out of there ASAP - - - - then watch how quickly the Taliban becomes a minor actor!
Sure, but there's still no indication that he realises that the GWoT wars, all of them, have always been and will always be criminal and, therefore, supreme international crimes punishable just like what happened at Nuremberg.
So sure, but not wholly; he clearly doesn't fully know history or current facts about these wars. He's neglecting the most important fact of all.
He'd be better off if he was a hippied, pot-smoking peacenik, that is, one who's bright enough to know that these wars are damn criminal and that there's no justifying them whatsoever. But he prefers to be a military man, which doesn't say much for the U.S. military, for all members are supposed to know that the first oath of all U.S. military members is not to the President, but to the Constitution. He evidently doesn't know much about U.S. military law that's of significant or the most significant value, for he sides against the Constitution.
But at least he's not in total darkness. Some light seems to have gotten past his skull and military shell.
Hoh's protesting the war . . . because the USA has lost it.
He doesn't condemn it, though. He's just sad that he won't be prancing down the street in a victory parade.
Calling all cars
Calling all cars
henry8, the marines are under attack (shriek!).
What's the matter, a cat ate you tongue?
From the halls of Montezuma, to the shores of Tripoli,
We will fight our corporation's enemies, with the lies that all can see.
Spiffy uniforms and proper brainwashing is a great formula. Just ask General of the USMC, two time medal of honor recipient, "War is a racket" Smedley Butler.
He wrote "War Is A Racket" after he retired and finally became a real hero. I wonder if it's required reading at our military academies.
He was also the one who blew the whistle on the coup, organized by Senator Prescott Bush, to oust Roosevelt. It seems he was the one they asked to replace Roosevelt. I also wonder if there are any like him around now.
ekzile -
Thanks for the trip down memory lane.
It still amazes me how the John Kerry who was a prominent public face for the VVAW in the early 1970's ran and hid from that laudable resume credential as the Democratic Party presidential candidate against George W. Bush in 2004.
I knew we were all in really deep shit when the Dem convention ended with "John Kerry reporting for duty". All reference to the candidate's parallel involvement in the massive US peace movement was decreed a forbidden topic. As I recall, only former President Jimmy Carter and Al Sharpton slipped in a quick reference to this credential of candidate Kerry in their remarks from the speakers' podium.
Combine the decision to try to out-military macho the macho Man with the equally mysterious decision of the Democratic Party's strategic braintrust to say not a single word about torture and the Abu Ghraib scandal throughout the entire 2004 campaign, and it's a miracle that election was so close it still had to be stolen (in Ohio, rather than Florida) to keep Bush/Cheney in the White House.
I really wonder what might have been, the same as I wonder who the real decision makers were who shaped Kerry's profile, and kept torture off the table for discussion, in the manner that it all so tragically played out.
Bill from Saginaw
Regarding the Kerry campaign, I had the same thoughts about the convention--I had a remote fantasy that Kerry might trot down to the protestors' cages and go inside and talk to them; I knew it was too extreme to even think he'd let them out but I think it would have been politically smart.
And the campaign was definitely one of the stupidest ever. Perhaps it speaks to Kerry's executive ability, or lack thereof. However, Gore's campaign completely ignored Bush's record of incompetence and failure in his business ventures, his shilling to get the people in Dallas to pay for a baseball stadium, and the fact that the real Governor of Texas is usually the Speaker of the House.
The Dems have been running from the "peacenik" label for decades now. My take on the better-late-than-never Marine captain Hoh's comments about not being a dope-smoking hippie peacenik is that this is the moment to point out that those peaceniks saw in Viet Nam exactly what he sees in Afghanistan--being anti-war was the logical conclusion based on the evidence, then as now. Dems, instead of defending their position as the logical and sane one, shirk at the possiblity of being called soft. They are just moral cowards.
John Kerry in the News
Vietnam Veterans Against the War Statement
Legislative Proposals Relating to the War in Southeast Asia Thursday, April 22, 1971 United States Senate, Committee on Foreign Relations, Washington, D.C.
http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Vietnam_Veterans_Against_the_War_Statement
excerpts:
In our opinion, and from our experience, there is nothing in South Vietnam, nothing which could happen that realistically threatens the United States of America. And to attempt to justify the loss of one American life in Vietnam, Cambodia or Laos by linking such loss to the preservation of freedom, which those misfits supposedly abuse, is to use the height of criminal hypocrisy, and it is that kind of hypocrisy which we feel has torn this country apart.
We found that not only was it a civil war, an effort by a people who had for years been seeking their liberation from any colonial influence whatsoever, but also we found that the Vietnamese whom we had enthusiastically molded after our own image were hard put to take up the fight against the threat we were supposedly saving them from.
We found also that all too often American men were dying in those rice paddies for want of support from their allies. We saw first hand how money from American taxes was used for a corrupt dictatorial regime. We saw that many people in this country had a one-sided idea of who was kept free by our flag, as blacks provided the highest percentage of casualties. We saw Vietnam ravaged equally by American bombs as well as by search and destroy missions, as well as by Vietcong terrorism, and yet we listened while this country tried to blame all of the havoc on the Vietcong.
We rationalized destroying villages in order to save them. We saw America lose her sense of morality as she accepted very coolly a My Lai and refused to give up the image of American soldiers who hand out chocolate bars and chewing gum.
We learned the meaning of free fire zones, shooting anything that moves, and we watched while America placed a cheapness on the lives of Orientals.
Now we are told that the men who fought there must watch quietly while American lives are lost so that we can exercise the incredible arrogance of Vietnamizing the Vietnamese.
We are asking Americans to think about that because how do you ask a man to be the last man to dies in Vietnam? How do ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake? But we are trying to do that, and we are doing it with thousands of rationalizations, and if you read carefully the President's last speech to the people of this country ...........
The workings of Washington must be so heinous as to transform one who could make the above speech to the one who behaved as he did during the "don't tase me bro" episode of free speech.
What I still don't get is WHY does anyone want to go on spending time in Congress as it operates?
"not some peacenik, pot-smoking hippie who wants everyone to be in love"
Heavens! We wouldn't want that!!!! :O :O :O
Yessir, the Graveyard Of Empires.
Americans never have been quick to learn.
"The Taliban," had to pay for 9/11, said the "war president" Bush. He bombed Afghanistan back to the stone age, and made the whole nation suffer, killed thousands of people, for the sins of 19 fanatical terrorists, none of whom were Afghans. In effect, Bush made use of the fascist doctrine of collective responsibility. The Israelis have long made use of this barbarous "strategy" in controlling the occupied territories. And both the US and Israeli government claim that they are fighting a profound evil called "terrorism."
Most sane and moral people all over the world, have little difficulty in understanding that it is the bombings and the occupations that incite "terrorism." The equation is simple: violent oppression brings violent resistance.I've always been struck by the fact that historians speak of "slave insurrections," a phrase which frames just resistance as somehow illegitimate or unlawful. Similarly, the Afghan people are somehow engaged in an "insurgency" in trying to expel foreign troops from their country. Kudos to Captain Hoh for recognizing the very human motives that impell Afghan resistance. Would that Obama comes to his senses and withdraws all troops from that tragic, suffering land...
In the system of slavery, from the point of view of the masters, slaves weren't really human or at least not human in the way of the master class.
In the system of imperialism, from the point of view of the imperialists, the natives aren't really human or at least not human in the way of the Chosen People..
Why is an American life worth more than an Afghan's?
This former "peacenik, pot-smoking hippie who wants everyone to be in love" agrees with the Hol's conclusion that we have no business in Afghanistan. Not with his cheerleading for Iraq, however. And not with his put-down of a group of people he disrespects: hippies from the sixties. Jeez--hippies? Guess he has to flex his muscles to show he is not one of THEM.
People brainwashed by military thinking have to make sure no one will see them as soft. Part of the macho man, Marlboro man, Testosterone Ted schtick. Are 'tough' and 'intelligent' added together to make a constant? More 'tough' means less 'intelligent'? Seems like it sometimes.
Much could be quoted here to prove BushCo launched a War OF Terror--a criminal act of the nth degree that should have been opposed by all areas of US society. It was nice for this guy to resign his commission; unfortunately, he's 8 years too late.
Continued US presence in Iraq and Afghanistan, coupled with continued US financing of the rape of Palestine, virtually ensure a cataclysmic series of events which will result in the assassination of the POTUS and coup led by a cabal of NeoCon Zionists.
stand with Obama or get out of the way. Even Code Pink now supports war in Afghanistan. As do MoveOn and Kos.
theowl -
Desecration of a Christian bible in the prisoners' presence was occasionally used as a Pentagon-approved phase of the SERE training of US special forces, trying to psychologically "break" the will of mock prisoners of war. The SERE program - skills geared towards helping potential POW's resist enemy evildoer brainwashing tactics - of course was later flipped inside out after 9/11, providing the eerie blueprint for affirmative use of the Bush/Cheney enhanced interrogation techniques on detainees held in US military/CIA black site custody.
Best bet is, sometimes Koran desecration is low level yahooism, sometimes a serious effort to implement a deranged, inherently counterproductive official US policy. And of course false allegations, or real false flag incidents of Koran desecration, are also fodder for the propaganda psy ops wars destined to play out as long as US forces of occupation remain stationed in war zones in the Muslim world.
As a long time member and canvasser for Move On, a frequent reader of Daily Kos, and an admirer of the creative nonviolent protest tactics of Code Pink, please point me to some specific examples where each of these high profile entities supposedly now "supports war in Afghanistan", rather than still publicly supports ending war in both Iraq and in Afghanistan and scaling back US militarism abroad and back home.
Facts and context, please.
You seem to conjure up the image of piles of burning bibles as a quasi-excuse for harboring anti-Muslim, aggrieved pro-Christian sentiments, a US president using his charisma to out Bush Bush in a dictatorial manner, along with a vast, personality cult worshipping left wing conspiracy, blindly and hypocritically following Obama in lockstep, like lemmings plunging over the cliff.
Hoot! Hoot!
A wise old troll should really mask his or her fantasies and talking points better as Halloween approaches.
Bill from Saginaw
Well said.
This owl character is fouling the good name of fowl everywhere.
Well, obviously an owl with two right wings can only fly in circles.
Worth a look, maybe, as freakish phenomena go-- but stare at it too long, and all you'll get is dizzy.
· Yr Obd't Servant
what is the big deal about burning a Quran? Bibles are destroyed all over the world all day long. What makes the Quran so special?
Burning the Koran is–more often than not– a racist act of abusive sadism usually conducted by agents of imperial fascism in situations of torture. That is what makes it a vile, abusive act: It is an act of domination and sadistic power conducted by a more powerful agency upon a weaker one.
The Koran remains a spiritual nexus of persecuted peoples against Zionism, Western capitalism and American fascism. That is why it maintains a truly spiritual resonance for its adherents and for humanity in general. The Bible carries no such contemporary grandeur; quite the contrary.
The Bible has become the murderous sword of a specific oppression not of the general project of a collective human liberation against the common evils which beset mankind: Namely resisting, if not destroying American domination.
The Bible should be destroyed as it has become a living defilement of itself and the wretched embodiment of American imperial hegemony. Its proponents have willfully traduced and abrogated any beneficent spiritual 'aura' that may have remained in the Biblical text and enlisted it in the cause of fascism and dread.
Christianity has become a baleful excrescence and a blight on humanity. I don't see the Koranic teachings having the same abusive function or the same morbidity in the larger scheme of things as does the Bible. It is a matter of scale, intent and effect. Clearly the biblical inspired terrorists are the most malevolent– armed with overwhelming military and technological powers of destruction.
I don't see the Koran giving its blessings to the Predator drones or to the overwhelming military forces of American war and programmatic state terror?
The human project and the defeat of America and the West is the right side to be on.The Bible has been consigned to barbarity and ignominy through the use it has been put to by the dominant mode of present, historical evil.
Having said that I leave you with quotation of wondrous beauty from the Bible (as literature), so you can duly lament the rot which has consumed it:
"Run now, I pray thee to meet her, and say unto her. Is it well with thee? Is it well with the child? And she answered. It is well." –(II Kings, 4:26)?
"...the Predator drone descends on yet another Afghan wedding celebration perhaps even packed with Christian bibles in its exploding cone...a letter of "Christian" love from America!
–(Jill Bains)
If you don't remember objections to desecration of bibles, uniforms, flags, or public monuments in the West in general and the US in particular, a few minutes with a search engine could repair that.
Since the faithful object to the burning of the Quran, non-Islamic Westerners might take it under advisement that the Quran is not altogether different -- "special," as I take you to mean it -- than the Bible or the various flags that hold meaning for Western cultures.
If the Islamic faithful hold their objects of ritual more divine than those of the West, that suggests that these faithful share more with Westerners than either might wish to acknowledge.
excerpts from Asiatimesonline - 4 articles.
==============
BREAKING NEWS
Afghan province falls to Taliban
The Taliban have taken control of Afghanistan's Nuristan province following the withdrawal of Western forces from key bases, as ordered by the American commander, General Stanley McChrystal. ATol brings you the full story in our next (Wednesday) edition.
=============
Afghan fury at Koran burning claims
Allegations that American forces burned copies of the Koran during a recent raid in central-eastern Afghanistan have led to a series of protests, including two in the capital, Kabul. The United States military denies the charges, saying Taliban insurgents are behind the burnings. - Abdullah Obaidi (Oct 27, '09)
====================
Gates gets grumpy in Tokyo
United States Secretary of Defense Robert Gates expected to leave Japan with a firm agreement in place for the relocation of the US Marine Corps base from Okinawa to Guam. But the recently elected Democratic Party of Japan played hardball, leaving Gates empty-handed. This and other disputes are a sign that Tokyo and Washington may be drifting apart after decades of close alliance. - Peter J Brown (Oct 27, '09)
======================
Beijing runs a diplomatic marathon
From the Americas to Europe to Asia, Chinese leaders this autumn are engaged in wide-ranging diplomacy to play up the country's status as a near superpower that is also a responsible stakeholder in the world community. The danger in Beijing's no-holds-barred projection of military and diplomatic prowess is that it may also render the "China threat" theory more credible. - Willy Lam (Oct 27, '09)
Well, here I try again.
America is stuck in Afghanistan because that's one place where the enemy is said to be. al-Qaeda and the Taliban are the enemy. The US military's goal is to prevent future terrorism by these enemies, because a retarded Congress (except Barbara Lee) wrote a vague, idiotic declaration of war against future enemies.
This war is insane and DAFT. Stop the war, not just try unsuccessfully yet again to stop each outbreak after it's occurred.
Close down the theater of absurd war in Afghanistan, and another theater will open somewhere else.
US troops will have to stay in Iraq to stop future terrorism, won't they?
al-Qaeda, the Taliban.........name your enemy. We need an enemy, any enemy, to continue our Imperialistic agenda. We're not keeping OUR country safe, we're trying to take over THEIR country, and control whatever energy resouces (oil, pipeline) they have and WE want.......
THAT sums up American Policy.
in other words - American Foreign Policy is nothing more than THIEVERY. it's in its very bones and structure.
it does it with a Global Scam called : "protection racket"..but is actually the entity - the USA -that the world needs protection FROM.
everywhere in the world - you name it - the crises that did NOT have to grow to such proportions, breadth, depth, expansion and irreconcilability are ALL
tied - like spokes of a wheel - to the CENTRAL issue of the global economy, whether it is in economics, culture or militarism:
US IMPERIALISM.
period.
Ray Berthiaume
According to U.S. Intelligence, there are 100 members of Al Quada in Afghanistan. I've read there are approximately 15,000 taliban in that area including Pakistan. It's costing a lot to get rid of them.