Not worth fighting for

WASHINGTON -- When Matthew Hoh joined the Foreign Service this year, he was exactly the kind of smart civil-military hybrid the administration was looking for to help expand its development efforts in Afghanistan.

A retired Marine 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 to publicly resign in protest over the Afghan war, which he had come to believe was simply fueling 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."

'IT WASN'T THE RIGHT THING'

The reaction to Hoh's letter was immediate. U.S. officials, concerned that they would lose an outstanding officer and perhaps gain a prominent critic, appealed to him to stay.

U.S. Ambassador Karl Eikenberry brought him to Kabul and offered him a job on his embassy staff. Hoh declined. From there, he was flown home for a meeting with Richard Holbrooke, the administration's special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan. "We took his letter very seriously, because he was a good officer," Holbrooke said.

While he did not share Hoh's view, Holbrooke said, "I agreed with much of his analysis." He asked Hoh to join his team in Washington, saying that from there Hoh could "effect policy and help reduce the cost of the war on lives."

Hoh accepted the argument and the job, but changed his mind a week later. "I recognize the career implications, but it wasn't the right thing to do," he said Oct. 23, after his resignation became final.

He wrote in his resignation letter that many Afghans are fighting the United States largely because U.S. troops are there -- in villages and valleys where outsiders, including other Afghans, are not welcome and where the corrupt, U.S.-backed national government is rejected. While the Taliban is a malign presence, and Pakistan-based Al-Qaida needs to be confronted, he said, the United States is asking its troops to die in Afghanistan for what is essentially a far-off civil war.

Hoh said 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.'"

AN UNLIKELY PATH

Hoh's first ambition in life was to become a firefighter, like his father. Instead, after graduation from Tufts University, he joined the Marines in 1998. After five years in Japan and at the Pentagon, he left the Marines, only to be recruited as a Defense Department civilian in Iraq. A trained combat engineer, he was sent to manage reconstruction efforts in Saddam Hussein's home town of Tikrit.

"At one point," Hoh said, "I employed up to 5,000 Iraqis" handing out tens of millions of dollars in cash to construct roads and mosques. His program was one of the few later praised as a success.

In 2005, Hoh took a job with BearingPoint, a major technology and management contractor, and was sent to the Iraq desk at State Department headquarters in Washington. When the U.S. effort in Iraq began to turn south in early 2006, he was recalled to active duty from the Reserves. He assumed command of a company in Anbar Province.

Hoh came home in the spring of 2007 with citations for what one Marine evaluator called "uncommon bravery," a recommendation for promotion, and what he later recognized was post-traumatic stress disorder.

Of all the deaths he witnessed, the one that weighed most heavily on him happened in a helicopter crash in Anbar in December 2006. He and a friend, Maj. Joseph McCloud, were aboard when the aircraft fell into the Euphrates River below Haditha dam. Hoh swam to shore, dropped his 90 pounds of gear and dived back in to try to save McCloud and three others he could hear calling for help.

He is a strong swimmer, but by the time he reached them, "they were gone."

"It's something I'll carry for the rest of my life," he said of his Iraq experiences. "But it's something I've settled, I've reconciled with."

Late last year, a friend told Hoh that the State Department was offering yearlong renewable hires for Foreign Service officers in Afghanistan. It was a chance, he thought, to use the development skills he had learned in Tikrit under a fresh administration.

DOUBTS BEGIN TO CREEP IN

It was in Jalalabad, in eastern Afghanistan, that his doubts started to form.

He 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 only achieved 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 2 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.

"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's doubts increased with Afghanistan's Aug. 20 presidential election, marked by widespread fraud. He concluded, he said in his resignation letter, that the war "has violently and savagely pitted the urban, secular, educated and modern of Afghanistan against the rural, religious, illiterate and traditional. ..."

With "multiple, seemingly infinite, local groups," he wrote, the insurgency "is fed by what is perceived by the Pashtun people as a continued and sustained assault, going back centuries, on Pashtun land, culture, traditions and religion by internal and external enemies. The U.S. and NATO presence in Pashtun valleys and villages, as well as Afghan army and police units that are led and composed of non-Pashtun soldiers and police, provide an occupation force against which the insurgency is justified."

Americans, he said, "must be reassured [that] their dead have sacrificed for a purpose worthy of futures lost, love vanished, and promised dreams unkept. I have lost confidence such assurances can be made any more."

Frank Ruggiero, the Kandahar-based regional head of the U.S. PRTs in the south, said that he was taken aback by Hoh's resignation, but that he made no effort to dissuade him. "It's Matt's decision, and I honored, I respected" it, he said. "I didn't agree with his assessment, but it was his decision."

TO READ MATTHEW HOH'S RESIGNATION LETTER, GO TO WWW.TINYURL.COM/YFM6JHK.