While Obama Dithers
James Joyner | October 27, 2009
An incredibly junior contractor-for-hire has resigned over disagreement with our AfPak policy, prompting a high level scramble within the administration and a long feature in the Washington Post.
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. "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."
The reaction to Hoh's letter was immediate. Senior U.S. officials, concerned that they would lose an outstanding officer and perhaps gain a prominent critic, appealed to him to stay.
U.S. Ambassador Karl W. Eikenberry brought him to Kabul and offered him a job on his senior embassy staff. Hoh declined. From there, he was flown home for a face-to-face meeting with Richard C. Holbrooke, the administration's special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan. "We took his letter very seriously, because he was a good officer," Holbrooke said in an interview. "We all thought that given how serious his letter was, how much commitment there was, and his prior track record, we should pay close attention to him."
While he did not share Hoh's view that the war "wasn't worth the fight," Holbrooke said, "I agreed with much of his analysis." He asked Hoh to join his team in Washington, saying that "if he really wanted to affect policy and help reduce the cost of the war on lives and treasure," why not be "inside the building, rather than outside, where you can get a lot of attention but you won't have the same political impact?"
Hoh's story is interesting. One gathers that he was an outstanding Marine officer and was a rising star as an FSO. Then again, he'd been on the job less than a year. Now, granted, that's enough time to win a Nobel Peace Prize. But, c'mon, is it really worth this high level of attention that he disagrees with national policy? His experience is, after all, entirely tactical -- and at the lower end of tactical at that.
Now, as it happens, I think Hoh's analysis of the situation is spot-on:
Hoh's doubts increased with Afghanistan's Aug. 20 presidential election, marked by low turnout and widespread fraud. He concluded, he said in his resignation letter, that the war "has violently and savagely pitted the urban, secular, educated and modern of Afghanistan against the rural, religious, illiterate and traditional. It is this latter group that composes and supports the Pashtun insurgency."
With "multiple, seemingly infinite, local groups," he wrote, the insurgency "is fed by what is perceived by the Pashtun people as a continued and sustained assault, going back centuries, on Pashtun land, culture, traditions and religion by internal and external enemies. The U.S. and Nato presence in Pashtun valleys and villages, as well as Afghan army and police units that are led and composed of non-Pashtun soldiers and police, provide an occupation force against which the insurgency is justified."
American families, he said at the end of the letter, "must be reassured their dead have sacrificed for a purpose worthy of futures lost, love vanished, and promised dreams unkept. I have lost confidence such assurances can be made any more."
But, gee whiz, our senior leadership is so lacking in confidence in their policy that they're afraid some 36-year-old former junior officer with nine months' experience in the foreign service (presumably, much of it spent in training!) will go on the "Colbert Report" and criticize it? So it would seem.
They've brought this on themselves. Granted, President Obama inherited this war and his people may have fought it differently had they been in charge during the first seven years. (An unlikely counterfactual, to be sure, since he was an unknown state senator at the time.) But it's a fight he clamored for during the campaign, stressing it as "a war of necessity." And he doubled down almost immediately, sending more troops and firing a well-respected four star commander to replace him with a counterinsurgency guru. But now he's dithering, signaling in the press that he's lost confidence in the strategy and can't make up his mind as to what to do now.
Yes, it's complicated. There are a lot of unknowns and the number of American casualties is escalating. But those men are dying while their commander-in-chief hems and haws, trying to decide whether to heed the expert advice of the general he hand-picked three months ago, do a 180 and go with a counter-terror strategy as preferred by Vice President Biden, or some politically expedient middle course. Their public indecisiveness certainly isn't doing much to bolster the resolve of the Matthew Kohs of the world, much less the young soldiers, sailors, airmen and marines being asked to risk their lives while they make up their minds.
Addendum: The original version of this had Hoh as a Foreign Service Officer, which the WaPo piece intimated he was. Reports later in the day corrected this impression. Hoh was a one-year contract hire under a new program the State Department is using to staff Provincial Reconstruction Teams in Afghanistan.
James Joyner is managing editor of the Atlantic Council. These views are his own. Photo credit: Getty Images.
Blog Response:
- Why Matthew Hoh Resigned From Afghanistan – Atlantic Wire, Max Fisher
Comments
U.S. policy towards Afghanistan needs to be rethought. While comparisons to Vietnam are facile if not a bit egregious, they do at least encapsulate the notion that more troops alone, at least without robust rules of engagement, does not necessarily facilitate better outcomes than lowering one's profile.
While I disagree vehemently with President Obama's overall thrust of foreign policy, I believe that Afghanistan has become a sinkhole where strategic thinking is being lost amidst domestic political fears and flawed analysis.
Our primary interest in Afghanistan is to prevent the reconstituting of al-Qaeda or similar organizations, thus preventing them from having an easy base of operations within which to train and plan external terrorist operations.
Creating a viable state in a nation with no long-term history of particularly effective governance is not in our interest provided that any instability in the nation spawned from a lack of central authority does not allow the aforementioned rise of terrorist groups.
By keeping intelligence assets in place, maintaining a small contingent of boots on the ground, sprinkling money to various tribal leaders, and assuring a rapid strike capability from the ocean or air, the U.S. can avoid the outcome assured by our previous disengagement following the removal of Soviet forces.
Meanwhile, the U.S. must focus on pushing the Pakistani military to keep neo-Taliban elements bottled up within the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) and engage India more robustly than we have since the inception of the Obama Administration.
It is the India-Pakistan relationship that will be the linchpin of long-term stability in the region, including in Afghanistan. While working on this, the U.S. need just assure its immediate interests are met, therefore not throwing limited resources into a place where the outcome is uncertain and those resources may be called upon at anytime to deal with other emergencies, perhaps, even the Iranian situation.
So while full withdrawal is not a legitimate option, "doubling down" is not either. An effort commensurate with our true interests actually threads the needle between raw defeatism and unsustainable committment to an area of some, though peripheral importance.
Greg,
I tend to agree with you and Hoh on this. My point is that President Obama and his team have had quite a long time to figure out what their policy is by now. Not only have they been in office for over 9 months -- longer than Hoh was in the foreign service! -- but they were elected nearly a year ago. And Obama's been running for president for nearly four years.
James:
You do raise a valid point, it would have been much better for President Obama not to have brought in McCryhstal when he did and give indications of a strategy that he clearly must not have thought completely through. I suspect Obama's entire "be tough on Afghanistan" had as much to do with covering his right flank during a political campaign against a war hero and perceived foreign policy expert as it did with a strategic analysis.
He then became boxed in when he won and is only now actually grappling with the implications.
While I hope he makes the right call, I concede to you that his methodology has been suspect. I think this raises some questions as to his suitability as Commander in Chief, but that is a much larger question with answers still far away from being definitively offered.
At this point, any call would be better than no call. Either give McChrystal what he needs, or fire him and put somebody in who wants to do it on the cheap. Public displays of cluelessness just embolden our enemies, who will presumably try to make it ugly to help push the decision the way they want it to go.
This view is bolstered by the fact the new strategy is just over six months old. It's hard to see why March's review is no longer operational (elections were shaky? hey, there's a surprise), other than the fact that the bill is coming due. This is a pretty good indicator that the President was never truly committed to a COIN strategy, and that our leadership doesn't know its own mind.
And that's all bad.
Actually, calling Matthew Hoh an "incredibly junior foreign service officer" is incorrect. He was not a career officer, he simply held a civil service temporary appointment.
State Department spokesman Ian Kelly noted that Matthew Hoh was a temporary hire working under a (renewable) one-year contract. He was hired in March 2009, went to Afghanistan in July and resigned in September. He was not a Foreign Service Officer - let alone a "high-ranking" or "senior" diplomat as has been widely reported.
If anyone is interested in being employed in the kind of position held by Mr. Hoh -- here's the website:
http://jobsearch.usajobs.gov/search.aspx?jbf513=ASO**&jbf574=ST00&q=&c4=...
John,
Yes, I saw that update later in the day. The Post story that was my only source at the time termed him an FSO, which did make the rapid career rise seem odd.
James
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