News Release

U.S. Official Resigns Over Afghanistan

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A top U.S. official in Afghanistan has resigned in protest of the war, the Washington Post reports. “I have lost understanding of and confidence in the strategic purposes of the United States’ presence in Afghanistan,” Matthew Hoh, the senior U.S. official in Zabul province, said in his letter of resignation. Many Afghans, he wrote, are fighting the U.S. largely because its troops are there. The U.S. is asking its troops to die in Afghanistan for what is essentially a far-off civil war, Hoh said. He added that he decided to speak out because “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.'”

ROBERT NAIMAN
Naiman is policy director of Just Foreign Policy and co-creator of the website NoEscalation.org, which enables Americans to track where their representatives in Congress stand on military escalation in Afghanistan.

He said today: “Hoh’s letter of resignation challenges key premises of the war, suggesting that if the United States withdrew its military forces from Afghanistan, much of the conflict might subside. Hoh also points out that the U.S. is essentially intervening in an ongoing Afghan civil war, something that most Americans don’t know and would likely oppose.”

Background:

Washington Post article “U.S. official resigns over Afghan war: Foreign Service officer and former Marine captain says he no longer knows why his nation is fighting

Text of Hoh’s four-page letter of resignation [PDF]

For more information, contact at the Institute for Public Accuracy:
Sam Husseini, (202) 347-0020; or David Zupan, (541) 484-9167