An American Lion

I wonder if Generals Ridgway and Gavin ever thought about resigning...

You can see the standard boilerplate coming--those who support the Obama administration will smear this man, those who want to take a dig at the administration will forget they used to smear people for this sort of thing and make him their soon-to-be-forgotten champion the next day, and no one will grasp the clarity of an act of simple protest. Of course, Matthew Hoh's protest leaves others in the lurch. It leaves other people to pick up the slack. He probably should have thought about them first and resigned after his tour. But that's me being nitpicky. I seem to recall a number of men in World War II who, when things got real difficult and the boss got too demanding, they resigned and went home. I think that's what they did. My history might be a little off on that. Granted, Hoh is a civilian, but he's part of the war effort. He is no stranger to duty. Would he have resigned if still in uniform? I don't think that he would have. Being a civilian gives him the freedom to resign, and that is his right.

Agree or disagree, and I certainly disagree with what he did, the resignation of Mr. Hoh should start a debate about what we are doing in Afghanistan, and, brother, those on the left who want the President to give us a speech and continue to do nothing and those on the right who think this is a COIN fantasy writ large with snakeaters and jungle boots don't get why this matters:

[...] 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?"

What a charade. They're panicking, and they are not dealing with a low-level resignation with professional detachment. They're afraid of a critic? As in someone who will write an op-ed or a blog post? Goodness, he might even appear on Fox News. I question why they're really upset. Is this because they've already had to talk so many others into staying? Not to go shooting past the obvious, but does anyone really think that there aren't already people who have quit or will now have a reason to quit or will make their protest known by quitting? Forget protocol--this could lead to a wave of resignations that would force the Obama Administration to stop kicking the can down the road and make some tough decisions.

Here's why I disagree--Hoh has taken on a bit of a Jesus complex, and if you read the rest of the article, he seems to be trying to view the entire picture from the standpoint of one person in one area who doesn't have the full benefit of the larger picture. Notice how he uses that word "strategic." I'm sorry, but you do the strategic stuff a few paygrades above where he stands. You view the strategic from a place of reason and cold calculation, not from your hut amongst the people. He seems to be operating from the assumption that everything he is saying is right and no one else knows what they are doing, and that's a dangerous place to be. There are too many variables, and while he is, no doubt, brave, capable and knowledgeable, he's not high enough up the foodchain to have the perspective to tell us why the war in the Afghan theater is really coming apart, strategically or otherwise. Oh, and he has some other personal issues as well. Sorry, but passionately obsessed people who have suffered from alcohol abuse and other ailments don't always strike me as being the go-to source for how to conduct a war, strategically. Tactically, no one can touch the man--he is a brave combat veteran, and I accord him that respect. Strategically, he may not be the best source of moral authority.

As for the idiocy of the journalism here, the idea that Hoh is the "first" to resign is ridiculous. Hundreds, if not thousands of men and women have "resigned" rather than continue to fight in Iraq and Afghanistan, in direct protest of the war. They're called retirees and former members of the military, who dropped retirement papers, went to medical boards, and found a way to get out of the military to avoid going back. In late 2007, the State Department was rocked by protests originating from career diplomats who refused to be deployed overseas.

Hoh is not a groundbreaker, per se, but his act should start the dialogue--why are we playing whack-a-mole? Why are we failing our troops by giving them a strategy to carry out that they're not equipped to proceed with? At some point, we have to get past juvenile smears and start asking hard questions. Carrying water up that hill for President Obama and begging everyone to cut him some slack is not going to get the job done.