Matthew Hoh, a U.S. foreign service officer, resigned recently from his commission in Afghanistan’s Zabul province, writing a letter in which he expressed doubts, not about “how we are pursuing this war, but why and to what end.”
The shades of Vietnam were presented in the letter itself. It was written Sept. 10, and the story fully surfaced this last week in the Washington Post.
Hoh was flown to an interview in Washington with Richard Holbrooke, the administration’s “point man” for Afghanistan and Pakistan, after his superiors grasped the political implications of the letter: its potential for damage when further circulated. Inevitably, today, such letters are—and this one may now be found readily in .pdf form on the Internet.
Before going any further with this column, let me make clear that this will not be about “Obama’s conduct of the war,” just as Hoh’s letter was not about that.
It was, instead, a well-reasoned, succinct, and effective challenge to the strategic thinking behind the whole eight-year war effort. It has obvious implications for Canada, because the same reasoning—and even the letter itself—could be used by the Canadian, as by any other allied government, to justify complete withdrawal from the Afghan theatre, leaving the Americans “holding the bag” in a quite unconscionable way.
We can no longer take for granted what we once could: that our elected politicians understand the value of our NATO alliance—that it trumps any short-term political exigency, and therefore no single member must act except in consort with all the others.
The Americans are, whether or not they ever wanted to be stuck with their superpower role, the lead partner in this alliance, and the lead partner in the field in Afghanistan. We must thus “go through Washington” to make our points, which may be tough luck, but ultimately not as tough as theirs: for the Americans carry even more of the burden for our own ultimate defence against “Islamism” and every other foreign threat, than we do ourselves.
So back to the letter. The writer of it, as he has said of himself to a journalist, is “not some peacenik, pot-smoking hippie who wants everyone to be in love.” He is a former marine, who has seen quite active and recent service (with citation), and whose attitude may be further characterized by the next quote, about America’s terrorist enemies: “There are plenty of dudes who need to be killed. … I was never more happy than when our Iraq team whacked a bunch of guys.”
The hippie view, typified for instance by Jack Layton in our Parliament—that we should trustfully negotiate with people such as Taliban who accept any such offer as a proof of weakness, and will not hesitate to exploit it bloodily—is itself impossible to argue with. Alas, his NDP is hardly the only such party now represented in the legislatures of the West.
Hoh admits to recent traumatic experience in the Afghan field, with a candour that may be impressive, but does undermine his case. He has got too close to what he is describing. A responsible “pro” would have left in print only the usual terse, one-sentence resignation, keeping the real arguments behind closed doors. But now Hoh is presenting himself as the Joe the Plumber of foreign policy.
For all that, his letter points directly to a very big issue, that has been neglected by commentators, including this one, for too long: the necessary distinction between two kinds of war, both of which the allies have been fighting, in Iraq and Afghanistan.
One of these is a “garrison” operation, in which we try to impose some domestic order upon, and import some infrastructure and hope into, a dysfunctional country, whose very disorder provides opportunities for our common enemy. As Hoh rightly argues, we can’t garrison Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, and a few other equally dysfunctional countries in the region; what is the point in Iraq and Afghanistan?
The other is a genuine counter-insurgency operation, in which our troops—chiefly special forces—go directly after the encampments of al-Qaeda and their like. And this other operation requires the opposite qualities of the first: not bottomless-wallet “compassion,” but ruthlessness and precision.
In Iraq, under the “surge” of David Petraeus, the two operations were briefly conjoined with remarkable effectiveness. Stanley McChrystal in Afghanistan has an analogous plan that Washington has been sitting on. But let us allow it can only work for a couple of years.
In the end we must somehow discover a way to pursue the latter operations (finding and killing international jihadis), while abandoning the former (trying to “build democracies” in places with no historical preparation). For our strategy has proved to be merely tactics on an unsustainable logistical scale.
We need a real strategy, that confronts the international threats directly, and will therefore not be kinder and gentler, but harder and meaner. Unfortunately, we also need the guts for that.
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