Garrison Keillor: Let us start making our way on out of Afghanistan, Mr. President.

[bigtree]

10/31/2009

When the tough should get going

by Garrison Keillor

Former Marine officer Matthew Hoh, who resigned his Foreign Service post in Afghanistan because he feels the war is pointless and not worth dying for, deserves all the attention he's gotten and more. The Obama administration faces hard decisions there, and the man made a good case against deeper American involvement. He says that our presence among the Pashtun people, the rural, religious people, is only aggravating a civil war between them and the urban, secular (and, it seems, fraudulent) government of Kabul, and the role of the Taliban and al-Qaeda is not central. The real issues are tribal and cultural.

It is rare that a high-level official — he was the senior State Department guy in Zabul province — resigns in protest, and in all the to-do about his four-page resignation letter, nobody had a single bad thing to say about Matthew Hoh.

The American people tend not to admire quitters, which is maybe why protest resignations are so rare. You can get up on your high horse and talk about your principles, but we suspect that you're just another slacker looking for an easy way out. Your old football coach told you that when the going gets tough, the tough get going, and by "get going" he didn't mean "write a four-page letter about your disillusionment with his coaching and the split-T offense in general."

On the other hand, you don't want to be the last man to believe in the mission after everyone else has seen the light and gone home . . .

read more: http://www.denverpost.com/recommended/ci_13680018

[unhappycamper]

1. k&r n/t

[joeycola]

2. Hi Bigtree. How are you doing? I read this a day or so ago. Thanks

Garrison. You are spot on.

[bigtree]

3. I'm cool, joeycola

I always save GK for the weekend where I can reflect and savor his words (even the hokum :))

[Swamp Rat]

4. k&r

[struggle4progress]

5. "senior State Department guy in Zabul" sounds good, but Hoh was a one year contract hire, so

calling him "a high-level official" is somewhat misleading. Hoh's four page letter is worth reading, and my own guess would be that he is in many ways correct

Some years ago, American cold-warriors were excited by the idea that the USSR might be lured into a war in Afghanistan that could damage the Soviets much as Vietnam damaged the US. They therefore deliberately engineered some incidents in Afghanistan, which they hoped would be read with alarm by the Kremlin. And a Soviet intervention, in support of the then-existing Afghan government indeed followed. The cold-warriors then insisted that the US should support religious extremists in Afghanistan: “These gentlemen are the moral equivalents of America’s founding fathers,” Reagan said in 1985. America provided weapons and other support. When the Soviets withdrew, the US had essentially no further interest in the ruined country. The extremists, however, were now armed and organized -- and they took over. The cold warriors regarded the extremists as friend, and maintained some usable contacts with them. The extremism of the Taliban, and its tolerance of al-Qaeda training camps, was well-known, when (long before 9/11) the GWB administration, motivated by petroleum interests, hosted Taliban at the White House and provided them millions in "drug war" funding. The Bushistas, of course, wanted to use 9/11 as a pretext for a general war in the area, aimed not only at Afghanistan but at Iran, Iraq, and Syria -- with rather little interest in Afghanistan:

Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld .. suggested bombing targets in Iraq .. and when he was told .. the enemy is in Afghanistan, that's where the Taliban and al Qaeda are, Rumsfeld .. said but there are no good targets in Afghanistan, there are lots of good targets in Iraq http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0403/22/ltm.03.html

Rumsfield has not been not alone, in regarding Afghanistan only as a warfield, without much regard for other issues affecting people's lives there. After 9/11, we should have attempted a reconstruction of Afghanistan, still in ruins from the 1980s, but we did not: instead, we made a short military stab at the Taliban and al-Qaeda, before blundering off to Iraq, Afghanistan being largely forgotten, except by the Afghanis and the troops sent there

[bigtree]

7. right, he was the top U.S. civilian official in the Zabul Province

. . . tho, no need to make it look like he was just some pion with a hard on

[struggle4progress]

8. A one year contract hire usually isn't considered "a high-level official"

I will repeat what I said above: I urge everyone to read what he said, since I think his comments are likely to be accurate as far as they go. Those comments, of course, are written in a cultural context where everyone regards Afghanistan merely as a battleground -- and, as I remarked above, that sort of thinking over decades has smashed Afghanistan to bits and left the survivors at the mercy of armed extremists

In a moral sense, a number of countries in the world (those that invaded or fought proxy wars there through clients or helped arm and organize extremists) owe Afghanistan somewhat more than oops! sorry! Of course, if practical political considerations prevent the US from regarding Afghanistan as anything more than a battleground, then Hoh's analysis is probably correct and we should withdraw, rather than doing more unnecessary harm. But even if that's the best option practically, it's unsatisfactory morally.

[bigtree]

6. .