2009-10-27

Big brass ones.

Sometimes it takes a real pair to do what's right.

Matthew Hoh, a former Marine who served in Iraq and later joined the State Department as a diplomat in Afghanistan, resigned on September 10th. His resignation was announced today in the Washington Post. The article includes a link to his resignation letter.

"However, in the course of my five months of service in Afghanistan, in both Regional Commands East and South, I have lost understanding of and confidence in the strategic purposes of the United States' presence in Afghanistan. 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. To put simply: I fail to see the value or the worth in continued U.S. casualties or expenditures of resources in support of the Afghan government in what is, truly, a 35-year old civil war."

I'll be the first to admit that I haven't been over there, and I haven't seen first-hand what's actually going on. However, I do worry about it, for two reasons: one, my brother's unit is due to deploy to Afghanistan sometime in the spring, and two, other than the initial push to "Get Osama Bin Laden" (which I now believe to have been so much propaganda) I've never really understood why we're in Afghanistan to begin with.

I remember back in high school in the late 80's, hearing in the news about how Afghanistan was "the Soviets' Vietnam", referring to a long drawn-out deployment of forces for no good reason... I thought that maybe we (the U.S.) had learned our lesson about sending troops over to another country for a long deployment with no real purpose. What I see now is that we haven't learned a damned thing, because we're doing it in two places now- Iraq and Afghanistan.

The only thing I can figure is that it's just another excuse to make the U.S. government keep borrowing more and more money from the Federal Reserve...

In any event... My hat is off to you, sir, for having the cojones to refuse to participate in this pointless occupation any more. Bravo, sir!

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