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A senior US diplomat in Afghanistan has become the first such person to resign in protest at the war against the Taliban, the Washington Post reports. State department employee Matthew Hoh, posted to Zabul province, said he quit because he had doubts about why the US was fighting, the Post says. His resignation letter, written last month, prompted officials to offer him alternative jobs, but he declined. Jeb Sharp discussed the resignation with Andrew Bacevich, a professor of International Relations at Boston University, and Peter Bergen of the New America Foundation.

• Washington Post coverage
• Letter of resignation (PDF)

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JEB SHARP: Electoral uncertainty in Afghanistan isn’t the only bump in the road to formulating a new American strategy there.  Here’s another: a State Department official in Afghanistan has resigned to protest the war.  Excerpts from Matthew Hoh’s resignation letter appear in today’s Washington Post.  The diplomat said he’s lost confidence in America’s strategic purposes in Afghanistan.  Andrew Bacevich is a professor of International Relations at Boston University.  Andrew Bacevich, what did you make of this letter?

ANDREW BACEVICH:  Well, I think it’s really a remarkable document.  Matthew Hoh has served his country with distinction in Iraq and Afghanistan, so he’s not some crazy leftie peacenik.  And I think his on-the-ground observations and skepticism about the purposefulness of the US military effort there really deserve to be taken quite seriously.

SHARP:  And you share that skepticism.  We also have on the line Peter Bergen of the New America foundation.  Peter Bergen, how does the letter strike you?

PETER BERGEN:  Well, you know, it’s certainly one person’s take and he has, as Professor Bacevich points out, a long, distinguished career in the US military, like Professor Bacevich himself.  But it sort of depends where you sit.  He was in Zabol province.  There are 34 other provinces in Afghanistan.  I’ve been embedded in Zabol province with the 110^th in 2006 when it was under a fair amount of Taliban attack, and there’s no doubt that Zabol is one of the most intractable of the 34 provinces in the country.  How applicable is that to every other province I think is highly debatable.  In many of the other provinces, this is really sort of a non issue.

SHARP:  But what about is a statement of one side of this debate that we’re having?  From where I sit, the two of you do encapsulate, in a way, two strong positions.  Peter Bergen, I think you think we need to press ahead with this war, and Andrew Bacevich, I think you would advocate extreme caution, and if I’m characterizing you properly, even reducing troop levels, where at this moment where President Obama is consulting and right now, you can’t force him to say what he’s going to do.  So we’re all in this debate together, trying to decide what’s going to happen in Afghanistan, and here’s this letter, really laying out a critique, based on history as well, saying–

BACEVICH:  From my point of view, the value of the letter comes from the way that Matthew Hoh frames the problem.  And I take the point that this is one guy offering a perspective from one particular place, but he offers a general observation in which he suggests that the motive force of the insurgency is not really to advance the purposes of the Taliban, but is really to fight against the foreign occupation.  Moreover, he argues that the fact that the United States finds itself supporting what is I think by anybody’s evaluation a corrupt and incompetent government, has the unintended effect of further legitimizing the insurgency.  So to the extent that you want to take this critique seriously, and it seems to me that the argument that more US troops pursuing a counter-insurgency strategy can turn things around, starts to look like a pretty dubious proposition.

SHARP:  Peter Bergen, what do you make of that?

BERGEN:  Well, really, what is McChrystal suggesting?  Essentially, he’s suggesting a population centric approach where you protect the big population centers and you withdraw from places like remote outposts in Zabol and other places, where I think the American presence is an irritant.  There may be more grounds of agreement than disagreement in the sense that a counter-terrorism strategy in the rural, fairly unpopulated parts of Afghanistan sort of makes sense.  A

counter-insurgency approach in the more populated parts of Afghanistan also makes sense, because only 12 percent of Afghanistan is cultivatable land, which means the vast majority of the population lives in a relatively small area, which can be protected.  And one final point on this, which is that it would be one things if the Afghans wanted us all out, but we’ve had probably a dozen polls by the BBC, for instance, ABC News, the Asia Society and poll after poll always finds the same thing, which is, international forces continue to be regarded favorably by a majority of the population.  The most recent poll, for instance, found that 63 percent of Afghans had a favorable view of the US military, and a fairly extraordinary number, given all the things that have gone wrong there in the past eight years.

SHARP:  Peter Bergen, what about Professor Bacevich’s point that counter-insurgency relies on a credible partner?  Everybody’s concerned about corruption in the government.

BERGEN:  That is, of course, a very good point, but I think we need to do something much more basic before we get to the point.  There’s going to be no perfect Afghan government for the foreseeable future.  It’s not a place that’s had enormously credible governments in the past.  Right now, what we’re not delivering is something more basic, which is just security for the population.  And before we sort of get to more fancy counter-insurgency notions of connecting people to the Afghan government, we just really need to produce security, which is the one thing the Taliban, when they were in power, managed to do.

SHARP:  Can outside forces do that?  I mean, what about the point that so much blood and treasure is being spent on a venture that there’s considerable skepticism about?

BACEVICH:  Towards the end of the second to last paragraph in the resignation letter is the one point I think where Matthew Hoh arguably goes outside his lane and comments on something that he probably doesn’t have the personal expertise, and yet it’s a very telling comment.  He quotes

what he says is some unnamed commander who apparently says to visitors in Afghanistan, “We are spending ourselves into oblivion.”  And Matthew Hoh goes on in this letter to make the point that we’re out of money, I mean, that this is an enterprise which holds the possibility of bankrupting the country, especially given the prospect that I think even proponents of the war share, that this eight year long war is going to continue for many more years to come and consume many more hundreds of billions of dollars and no doubt hundreds, if not thousands, of American lives.  So in a sense, his concluding point is, can we really afford this?  And I think by implication, are there not alternatives to achieving our interests in Afghanistan that don’t cost so much?

SHARP:  Peter Bergen, how do you measure the cost, and how do you think about it as you support, presumably, McChrystal’s strategy?

BACEVICH:  Well, a couple of quick factual points.  One is that as a percentage of GDP, the United States is spending perhaps 4 to 5 percent on its military, of which historically, Afghanistan has consumed less than 10 percent, so we’re talking about 0.4 percent of the federal budget.  Now that is obviously going to go up.  I think it’s a very reasonable question to ask, but let’s do the counter-factual.  We say, okay, let’s do a lighter approach, more counter-terrorism.  Let’s draw down.  We’re an irritant, etc.  That would all be fine and good if we hadn’t done that already for the past several years. That was essentially the Bush adverse to nation building approach, where we had 6,000 American soldiers on the ground.  That’s about the size of a police department in a city like Houston in a country the size of Texas, with a population of 30 million.  And we got what we paid for. We did it on the cheap.  The Taliban came back.  They’ve morphed together ideologically and tactically with al Qaida, so I think the burden is on the other side of this debate to say, “How would it be different this time around?”  We’re going to do the light approach, but somehow we’re going to do it in a way that’s either smarter or more efficacious or both.

BACEVICH:  Well, I think the answer to that, if I may, is that we haven’t really been doing a counter-terrorism approach during the period when Iraq was consuming all the resources.  I think the most important element in a counter-terrorism approach would be intelligence collection and surveillance.  And during the years 2003 to 2008, Iraq was consuming intelligence and surveillance assets.  Were they to be focused on Afghanistan, at least arguably there might be some opportunity to make a counter-terrorism strategy approach work.

SHARP:  Well, thank you both very much.

BACEVICH:  Thank you very much.

BERGEN:  Thank you.

SHARP: Andrew Bacevich is a professor of international relations at Boston University.  His latest books is:  “The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism.”   Peter Bergen is a scholar in residence at the New America Foundation.

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