BY CAMILLA MORTENSEN
Ending War in Afghanistan
A Q&A with Matthew Hoh, first U.S. official to resign in protest over the Afghan war
M
atthew Hoh didn’t mean to make headlines when
he resigned from his position as a political offi cer
in the U.S. Foreign Service. Hoh was the senior
civilian representative of the American government in
Afghanistan; he was also a former Marine Corps captain, a
State Department representative and a man who describes
the military as the best job he ever had. In September 2009,
Hoh became the fi rst U.S. offi cial to publicly resign in
protest over the Afghan war. He will be speaking in Eugene
June 28 (see details below).
He writes in his four-page, single-spaced letter of
resignation, which was published on the front page of the
Washington Post: “The dead return in bodily form only
to be received by families who must be reassured their
dead have sacrifi ced for a purpose worthy of futures lost,
love vanished, and promised dreams unkept. I have lost
confi dence that such reassurances can anymore be made.
As such, I submit my resignation.”
Tell me a little about your background.
I served in the Marine Corps for 10 years both active
and reserve. I served in Iraq twice — once on a State
Department team as member in Iraq in 2004-2005 and then
as a Marine Corp reservist. I was in Iraq from 2006 to 2007
as a company commander; both times I was in Sunni areas.
I’ve worked in the State Department as a consultant on
Iraq issues and also worked for the Department of Defense
as a contractor on suicide bomber technology and IEDs.
In 2009 I took a position with the State Department in
Afghanistan as a political offi cer serving on a provincial
reconstruction team in both the east and the south of the
country, and I was there for fi ve months before I resigned.
What was different about Afghanistan that led
you to resign?
It wasn’t so much different as it was similar. The policies
that we had in Afghanistan reminded me so very much of
policies in Iraq. Policies that we had that pushed people
to support the insurgency, because they were policies that
marginalized or disenfranchised part of the population,
were the same polices that we were pursing in Afghanistan.
Additionally, just like in Iraq, where our troops were
dying for no good reason and it wasn’t making the U.S.
safer, the same was now true in Afghanistan. Whereas in
2001 it was the right thing to do to go into Afghanistan and
to destroy al-Qaeda’s base of operations and scatter them, in
2009 al-Qaeda had long since left Afghanistan
and more importantly had devolved into
an organization that wasn’t going to be
affected by American troops fi ghting
and dying in Afghan valleys
or villages. It’s a disparate,
devolved, decentralized, fl at
organization that operates
across the world so they don’t
really need a safe haven in
Afghanistan as maybe they
once did.
So it was that — this idea that
American families were losing
their sons in Afghanistan for no
good cause just as lots of families lost
sons and daughters in Iraq for no good
reason. It was a combination of this makes
no sense, guys are dying for no good reason and
the policy is making this confl ict worse. The U.S. does
have an interest in making that part of the world stable, but
our policies there were making it less stable. The war effort
and our policies were counterproductive.
It got to the point where I had been there after fi ve
months, speaking about this with people I worked with and
worked for, and after seeing we were going to escalate the
confl ict again … this idea that we were going to militarily
win there was not possible, it was counterproductive, it
was going to make the situation worse. A year and a half
later looking back — that’s exactly what happened.
It was a combination of a moral disagreement with this
confl ict as well as just a professional view of someone
who’s done this kind of stuff, who studied it most of his
life. It was just an unfounded, counterproductive policy.
Was it diffi cult to go from being a part of the
military to disagreeing with what the military
was sent to do?
It wasn’t a disagreement with the military; it was a
disagreement with the policies, a disagreement with our
political leadership as well as our military leadership. … In
Afghanistan you had military leaders who either failed to
recognize the nature of the insurgency, failed to recognize
what the problem is. Or it’s not in their interests. There are
policies that better suit them so they don’t advance or put
forth more honest assessments.
But then, too, it’s the civilian leadership
as well that I disagree with. There has
been almost no oversight of the war
by Congress. You saw the way
President Obama was treated
in 2009; he was given almost
no alternative to the war in
Afghanistan by his staff,
by his people, other than
to escalate. I don’t have a
problem with the military;
I have a problem with the
policies that the military has
been asked to enact.
You resigned publicly, and
your letter was in the Washing-
ton Post.
I struggled with that a bit, with what to
do … People were telling me, “If you do this it will be
a big deal,” but I didn’t really think much of it. One I
wasn’t going to speak to the press while still on the State
Department payroll. Then it took me four weeks to get out
of the State Department just because of the bureaucracy …
Finally when I got out, I decided because of the tenor of
what I see in the debate of Afghanistan right now — and
this was in the fall of 2009 and the debate on the troop
surge was going on — the tenor of it, the depth of it. I
didn’t see it was adequately or honestly being portrayed.
So I called the Washington Post because I just wanted a
chance to write an op ed and say this is why I don’t think
we should escalate in Afghanistan and this is why I think
we should be getting out of Afghanistan. So it wound up
being front page on the Post.
If I had to do it over again, in terms of resigning, I
would have done it. It’s a weird thing to me still. Before
that Washington Post article, the last time I had been in the
newspaper it was my senior year in high school for track. I
had no interest in being a public persona but I am happy to
be talking about this because I think it’s important.
Matthew Hoh is now a Senior Fellow at the Center for International Policy
and the Director of the Afghanistan Study Group. His writings appear in the
Huffington Post and his letter of resignation in full can be found at http://
wkly.ws/12o Hoh will speak with Lewis & Clark professor Zaher Wahab on
“Afghanistan: How Do We End America’s Longest War?” at 7 pm Tuesday,
June 28, Harris Hall, 125 E. 8th Ave. FREE. For more info contact the
Community Alliance of Lane County at 485-1755.
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