Afghanistan: Former Marine at State Resigns
27 October 2009 12:49 am by Taylor Marsh
updated version cross-posted at Huffington Post
His name is Matthew Hoh and this could turn into a story that will haunt Pres. Obama’s decision on Afghanistan every day until the strategy is announced. I’m sure it is already. Hoh simply doesn’t believe in where the U.S. mission has been and where Obama is about to take the U.S. mission in Afghanistan. No doubt it will fuel people who want to withdraw, even as I continue to believe from all information I’ve gathered that no more troops is step one, with many complicated issues to address more important than sending in more U.S. soldiers. So, when Hoh says, “But you have to draw the line somewhere, and say this is their problem to solve,” I absolutely agree. But as it now stands, the Afghan women are worse off today than they were when the Taliban reigned. We cannot leave it at that or Afghanistan will be more than a corrupt mess; it will revert to a failed state, because no country can stabilize with the women of that country being gang raped, reduced as property and held under lock and key. After all, it was Carter who authorized the first funding that begat Reagan’s partnership with Zia that begat the mujahadeen that begat William Casey’s obsessions that begat, and on and on, until Bush invaded after 9/11, that became the mess he dropped in Obama’s lap.
Mr. Hoh adds more to the nightmare Obama’s been handed after years of neglect by Bush-Cheney:
Hoh was assigned to research the response to a question asked by Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, during an April visit. Mullen wanted to know why the U.S. military had been operating for years in the Korengal Valley, an isolated spot near Afghanistan’s eastern border with Pakistan where a number of Americans had been killed. Hoh concluded that there was no good reason. The people of Korengal didn’t want them; the insurgency appeared to have arrived in strength only after the Americans did, and the battle between the two forces had achieved only a bloody stalemate.
Korengal and other areas, he said, taught him “how localized the insurgency was. I didn’t realize that a group in this valley here has no connection with an insurgent group two kilometers away.” Hundreds, maybe thousands, of groups across Afghanistan, he decided, had few ideological ties to the Taliban but took its money to fight the foreign intruders and maintain their own local power bases.
ad_icon“That’s really what kind of shook me,” he said. “I thought it was more nationalistic. But it’s localism. I would call it valley-ism.”
Hoh also believes in more emphasis on Pakistan, on which no expert I’ve heard or talked to disagrees. That’s likely just one reason, according to the Washington Post, that Vice President Biden’s foreign policy adviser, Antony Blinken, has asked Hoh to talk with him.
One of the biggest obstacles is Pres. Karzai, a man who is the women of Afghanistan’s enemy and proved it conclusively with the Marital Rape Law he championed that turned into an international incident. Ann Jones writes regularly for The Nation, covering the plight of Afghan women, among other issues. Her piece last week covered ground I’ve heard many times before, while bringing home a critical point that needs to be highlighted over and over again, which I covered on the NAF event featuring David Loyn. It focuses on Afghan aid. Jones:
Today, most American so-called development aid is delivered not by USAID, but by the military itself through a system of Provincial Reconstruction Teams (PRTs), another faulty idea of former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. Soldiers, unqualified as aid workers and already busy soldiering, now shmooze with village “elders” (often the wrong ones) and bring “development,” usually a costly road convenient to the PRT base, impossible for Afghans to maintain and inaccessible to women locked up at home. Recent research conducted by respected Afghanistan hands found that this aid actually fuels “massive corruption”; it fails to win hearts and minds not because we spend too little but because we spend too much, too fast, without a clue. Meanwhile, the Taliban bring the things Afghans say they need–better security, better governance and quick, hard-edged justice. US government investigators are looking into allegations that aid funds appropriated for women’s projects have been diverted to PRTs for this more important work of winning hearts and minds with tarmac. But the greatest problem with routing aid through the military is this: what passes for development is delivered from men to men, affirming in the strongest possible terms the misogynist conviction that women do not matter. You’ll recognize it as the same belief that, in the Obama administration’s strategic reappraisal of Afghanistan, pushed women off the table.
What Hoh and Jones and everyone else comes up against is that Afghanistan is worse today than it was. We’ve also unlocked the women’s independence genie, which has unleashed misogyny that was once tightly bottled, because the men ruled with impunity. Without the West, the women of Afghanistan will suffer far more than they already have, with the country spiraling further down with them. Because no country can survive the slaughter of women’s rights and remain stable.
The other side of the knife is that it will take a very long time before Afghanistan will respect women on even a basic level: That their lives matter.
Sect. Hillary Clinton could be a powerful voice for Afghan women and girls. Yet the Obama administration obviously doesn’t want to rock that boat, deeming the situation too volatile, with U.S. representatives from all quarters praising Karzai, which includes John Kerry. Meanwhile, the women and girls of Afghanistan go unmentioned on any serious note, especially where Karzai is concerned, even from progressives who are using the arguments that the violence is making things worse for women, without acknowledging what would happen if the U.S. pulled out and left the misogynistic mayhem to metastasize.
We uncorked these forces. On all that’s moral we cannot turn our backs. The hardest part is that it’s not about more U.S. troops, even as we cannot think about withdrawing. Karma is a bitch and she’s looking for retribution closure mercy.
to be continued…
