If Matthew Hoh could tell you one thing to help you understand the U.S.'s predicament in Afghanistan, he'd tell you:
The presence of our ground combat troops is not doing anything to defeat al-Qaida.
Think about that for a moment. We are paying roughly $1 million per troop, per year in Afghanistan. That's roughly twice the per-troop cost in Iraq. We've suffered well more than 800 deaths in Afghanistan. And yet here is the former top civilian official in Afghanistan's Zabul province, a former Marine who served in Anbar province in Iraq, telling us that the presence of our ground forces does nothing to defeat the organization that's supposedly the target of our operations in that country.
So, if we're not going about the business of defeating al-Qaida in Afghanistan, what are we doing?
We're involved in a civil war in Afghanistan. We're only taking one side in that civil war. And, our presence there is only encouraging the civil war to go on.
A former Marine Corps captain with combat experience in Iraq, Hoh had also served in uniform at the Pentagon, and as a civilian in Iraq and at the State Department. By July, he was the senior U.S. civilian in Zabul province, a Taliban hotbed.
But last month, in a move that has sent ripples all the way to the White House, 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."
Kerry proceeds from a nonsensical definition of success:
I define success as the ability to empower and transfer responsibility to Afghans as rapidly as possible and achieve a sufficient level of stability to ensure that we can leave behind an Afghanistan that is not controlled by Al Qaeda or the Taliban.
Having the "ability" to do something is not success. Saying you're going to do something "as rapidly as possible" tells you nothing about how quickly you will do it. What, you think there's a plausible future where the president tells the American people that he screwed around a bit instead of getting Afghanistan done as "rapidly as possible?" Sloppy definitions make poor policy, and that's what we get from the rest of the speech. For example, take this goofy piece of self-contradiction:
Second, we simply don't have enough troops or resources to launch a broad, nationwide counterinsurgency campaign. But importantly, nor do we need to.
We all see the appeal of a limited counterterrorism mission- and no doubt it is part of the endgame. But I don't think we're there yet. A narrow mission that cedes half the country to the Taliban could lead to civil war and put Pakistan at risk.
What a mess. We don't have enough troop "for a broad, nationwide counterinsurgency," but we can't cede "half the country to the Taliban" without risking civil war. Following his warning about the dangers of ceding "half the country," Kerry calls for "narrowly focused" counterinsurgency operations in less than 40 percent of the country.
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