First U.S. Official Quits Over Afghan War

The first U.S. official resigned in protest of the U.S. occupation of Afghanistan last month.

 WASHINGTON, D.C. — The first U.S. official resigned in protest of the U.S. occupation of Afghanistan last month.

Matthew Hoh, 36, a former Marine Corps captain stepped down from his post as the senior State Department official in Afghanistan’s Zabul province.

Why?

“I have lost understanding of and confidence in the strategic purposes of the United States’ presence in Afghanistan, he wrote in a four-page Sept. 10 letter.

Hoh said that he resigned not because of how the military is involved “but why and to what end.”

The White House tried to make Hoh stay at his post; however, he told The Washington Post that remaining “wasn’t the right thing to do.”

Hoh quit a week after taking a job with Richard C. Holbrooke, the Obama administration’s special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan.

“I want people in Iowa, people in Arkansas, people in Arizona, to call their congressman and say, ‘Listen, I don’t think this is right,” he said.

Hoh became disillusioned after two events: one, his observation that the insurgency is much more localized, not nationalized, and two, his belief that the Aug. 20 Afghan presidential election was fraudulant.

In his resignation letter, he described the war as a fight between two classes of Afghans, the urban elites versus the rural illterates, the later supporting the insurgency that perceives the foreign onslaught as a continuation of assaults going back centuries.

Hoh said he would advice a reduction in combat forces, not increase as the Obama administratoin’s military chiefs suggest.