Think Progress

Matthew Hoh: ‘I Firmly Believe That We Are Taking Part In A Civil War’ In Afghanistan

Last week, former Marine captain and State Department employee Matthew Hoh made headlines when he went public with his resignation from the administration over his opposition to the continuation of the war in Afghanistan. In a four-page letter he sent to the State Department, he explained his resignation by writing that the U.S. presence in Afghanistan serves to “bolster a failing state, while encouraging an ideology and system of government unknown and unwanted by [the Afghan] people.”

This past Sunday, CNN’s Fareed Zakaria interviewed Hoh about his views on the war. During one segment of the interview, Zakaria asked Hoh why he feels the U.S. should begin to draw down its troops from the country. Hoh replied that he doesn’t see the Afghan conflict as one between the U.S. and the Taliban, but rather as a 35-year long “civil war” between rural Pashtuns “who want to be left alone” and an urban government the U.S. is backing:

HOH: I firmly believe that we are taking part in a civil war. We are on the same side of the civil war that the Soviets intervened on.

ZAKARIA: So, you have a divide among the Pashtuns. There’s the urban middle class. And Karzai, presumably, who is a Pashtun, comes from this urban middle class.

HOH: Correct.

ZAKARIA: Many of them left the country after the — during the years of the civil war. And the ones who have stayed to fight, who fought the Soviet Union and who are now fighting us, are the rural, mountain tribe Pashtuns who resent the central government and its intrusions.

HOH: Who want to be left alone.

Watch it:

Hoh also told Zakaria that he thinks keeping 60,000 troops in Afghanistan is detrimental to U.S. security. “Occupying a location only provides justification and only lends credence to the goals of that organization,” he said. “It only inspires young Muslim men to defend their culture against an occupying army, which is what we are.”

When the CNN host asked Hoh why he was speaking out, the former State Department employee cited support from two groups: Afghan Americans and U.S. soldiers serving in Afghanistan. “I’ve had a lot of Afghan-Americans contact me and say, ‘Matt, you get it,’” Hoh told Zakaria. “I’ve gotten many e-mails from guys [serving] in Afghanistan…men and women who are saying, ‘Matt, thanks for doing this.’”

Santorum On Resourcing Afghanistan War: ‘That Was Not Done By The Prior Administration’

Last week, Vice President Dick Cheney attacked President Obama, saying he is “afraid to make a decision” on the war in Afghanistan and that he’s “dithering.” A number of conservatives, including Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT) and columnist George Will, disagreed with Cheney’s language. “I would never want to call my president ‘dithering,’” Hatch said.

But many on the right have failed to mention the more substantive point, namely that Cheney and the Bush administration itself “dithered” on Afghanistan and diverted valuable resources to invade Iraq. But last night on Fox News, former Republican senator Rick Santorum stepped up to the plate:

SANTORUM: My sense is that we have an obligation to support our generals in the field, to give them the resources they need to accomplish the mission. That was not done by the prior administration. Let’s be very clear about that. They put their own political imprint on the Afghan strategy.

Watch it:

Of course, Santorum is right. In 2008, Gen. David McKiernan, then the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, asked the Bush administration for more troops, a request that was denied.

Indeed, as McClatchy’s Jonathan Landay — one of the few Washington journalists whose reporting matched the facts in the run-up to the Iraq war — asked of Cheney’s recent attacks: “Do we smell a campaign of historic revisionism by those widely seen as primarily responsible for the disaster in Afghanistan that has prompted Army Gen. Stanley A. McCrystal’s request for up to 80,000 more soldiers?”:

As late as December 2005, despite official warnings about the Taliban resurgence and a lack of U.S. resources for critical reconstruction programs, the Bush administration planned to reduce the 19,000 U.S. troops then in Afghanistan by 2,500 soldiers in order to bolster hard-pressed U.S. forces in Iraq.

And even after seven years of war _ and the deaths of 630 U.S. service members, more than 400 other coalition soldiers and thousands of Afghans _ the Bush administration lacked strategies for dealing with the al Qaida and Taliban safe haven in the tribal areas of Pakistan, where it backed a military dictatorship, or building Afghan security forces, according to the Government Accountability Office.

It’s nice to see Santorum recognize reality.

Podesta: Bush Administration Spent Only One Hour On Afghanistan Report It Handed Off To Obama »

For weeks, former Bush administration officials have been attacking President Obama for “dithering” on whether to send more troops to Afghanistan, with Vice President Cheney saying that “signals of indecision out of Washington hurt our allies and embolden our adversaries.” But these Bush officials are also facing criticisms for largely neglecting Afghanistan in order to invade Iraq. In response, they have been citing an Afghanistan strategy report they handed off to the Obama administration that clearly laid out recommendations for moving forward. From Cheney’s recent remarks to the Center for Security Policy:

In the fall of 2008, fully aware of the need to meet new challenges being posed by the Taliban, we dug into every aspect of Afghanistan policy, assembling a team that repeatedly went into the country, reviewing options and recommendations, and briefing President-elect Obama’s team. They asked us not to announce our findings publicly, and we agreed, giving them the benefit of our work and the benefit of the doubt.

Today on ABC’s This Week, Center for American Progress President and CEO John Podesta revealed that the Bush administration spent just one hour on that report:

PODESTA: [T]hey did present him with a report at the very end of the Bush administration, but I have it from reliable sources that the principals in the Bush administration spent one hour on that report before they handed it off to Obama.

Watch it:

Recently, Sen. Ted Kaufman (D-DE) — a former top aide to Biden and co-chair of the Vice President’s transition team — said that the Bush administration basically just “threw” the report “to the transition team as they were going out the door”:

KAUFMAN: So for him [Cheney] to come in at the end and say, “Well, we did it wrong for eight years. But then, in the end, we gave them a plan which really is what they should have used.” Let me tell you something: This administration came in. Rahm Emanuel was there. I was on the transition team on this. They started from scratch on Afghanistan. They took a blank piece of paper out and said, “What are we going to do to get this thing done?” … It was absolutely the perfect time to take a hard look at what we’re doing.

Also on This Week, conservative pundit George Will praised Obama’s process on Afghanistan, stating, “Well, also, a bit of dithering might have been in order before we went into Iraq in pursuit of non-existent weapons of mass destruction. So for a representative of the Bush administration to accuse someone of taking too much time is missing the point.”

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Gibbs Responds to Cheney: He ‘Seems To Have Forgotten His Role In The Last Seven Years Of Afghanistan’ »

Last night in a speech to the Center for Security Policy, Vice President Cheney attacked President Obama for “dithering” on whether to add more troops to Afghanistan. “[T]he success of our mission in Afghanistan is not only essential, it is entirely achievable with enough troops and enough political courage,” said Cheney.

As ThinkProgress has pointed out, in 2008, the Bush administration rejected the request for 30,000 more troops from Gen. David D. McKiernan, then the top U.S. commander in Kabul. “There was a saying when I got there: If you’re in Iraq and you need something, you ask for it,” McKiernan said in an interview after he was fired. “If you’re in Afghanistan and you need it, you figure out how to do without it.”

In today’s White House press briefing, Gibbs referenced McKiernan’s troop request to hit back on the emptiness of Cheney’s accusations:

GARRETT: So that was a specific reference to McKiernan’s request that said that specific troop request was not taken seriously.

GIBBS: It wasn’t — Whether it was taken seriously or not, it wasn’t filled. I assume since it wasn’t filled, it was not taken seriously. Maybe they filled unserious ones and didn’t fill serious ones. That’s a fabulous question for the Vice President, who seems to have forgotten his role in the last seven years of Afghanistan.

When Fox News reporter Major Garrett then asked whether it was “proof of unseriousness to not necessarily agree with a request for troops submitted by a commander in the field,” Gibbs replied:

GIBBS: No. I’m simply saying, I think it’s interesting what the Vice President is suggesting the President isn’t acting on is what the previous administration didn’t act on, right? [...]

Help me understand the rationale how one goes from half as many troops as are now in Afghanistan under his watch, to 68,000, to now wanting an additional 40 [thousand], when you didn’t want the additional troops that President Obama approved. I mean, how do you go from 68-plus, when you didn’t want 34-plus? How — Do you — It defies some modicum of logic to get “I didn’t want to go from 35,000 to 65,000, but I want to go from 65,000 to 100,000.” Fuzzy math.

Watch it:

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Cheney: Obama Should Stop ‘Dithering’ On Afghanistan And Just Copy The Bush Administration’s Strategy

Yesterday, Vice President Cheney spoke at the Center for Security Policy, run by former Reagan official and prominent neoconservative Frank Gaffney. Cheney used the opportunity to aggressively attack President Obama, accusing him of “giving in to the angry left” and “dithering while America’s armed forces are in danger.” He added that because Obama “seems afraid to make a decision” on whether to add more troops to Afghanistan, he should just emulate the Bush administration’s strategy since it was so successful:

We should all be concerned as well with the direction of policy on Afghanistan. For quite a while, the cause of our military in that country went pretty much unquestioned, even on the left. The effort was routinely praised by way of contrast to Iraq, which many wrote off as a failure until the surge proved them wrong. Now suddenly – and despite our success in Iraq – we’re hearing a drumbeat of defeatism over Afghanistan. These criticisms carry the same air of hopelessness, they offer the same short-sighted arguments for walking away, and they should be summarily rejected for the same reasons of national security.

Watch the speech here:

With his criticisms, Cheney joins former White House adviser Karl Rove, who has been using his on-air and print outlets to blast Obama’s Afghanistan policies and rewrite history of President Bush’s legacy.

Many Americans — both on the left and commanders in the military — were critical of the Bush administration’s policies in Afghanistan. As early as 2005, the Center for American Progress called for a strategic redeployment from Iraq, urging more troops for Afghanistan where greater resources were “urgently needed to beat back the resurging Taliban forces and to maintain security throughout the country.” Additionally, in 2008, Gen. David D. McKiernan, then the top U.S. commander in Kabul, specifically asked the Bush administration for more troops for Afghanistan, but was rebuffed:

“There was a saying when I got there: If you’re in Iraq and you need something, you ask for it,” McKiernan said in his first interview since being fired. “If you’re in Afghanistan and you need it, you figure out how to do without it.” By late last summer, he decided to tell George W. Bush’s White House what he knew it did not want to hear: He needed 30,000 more troops. He wanted to send some to the country’s east to bolster other U.S. forces, and some to the south to assist overwhelmed British and Canadian units in Helmand and Kandahar provinces.

The Bush administration opted not to act on McKiernan’s request and instead set out to persuade NATO allies to contribute more troops.

Cheney also claimed, “Make no mistake, signals of indecision out of Washington hurt our allies and embolden our adversaries. Waffling, while our troops on the ground face an emboldened enemy, endangers them and hurts our cause.” What endangered U.S. troops in Afghanistan was Bush and Cheney’s shift of focus to the Iraq war. Military officials have said that the Taliban was pretty much defeated in 2002, but regrouped when the Bush administration decided invade Iraq.

Leading Democratic Hawk Jane Harman Opposes Troop Increase In Afghanistan

Rep. Jane Harman (D-CA), who has earned a reputation as a hawkish Democrat, has indicated that she is aligning with House liberals against sending more troops to Afghanistan. In the past, Harman had indicated support for increasing troops, stipulating that the surge should be tied to progress against corruption in Afghanistan. According to The Swamp, Harman is now less inclined to pour more U.S. troops into the conflict:

Harman, a longtime Intelligence Committee member, told a Brookings Institution gathering today that any further increases “wouldn’t be well received” on Capitol Hill.

Harman’s view is that the Obama administration should deal with government corruption, and build up Afghan forces, before Congress is asked to pay for more U.S. troops. Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the U,S. and NATO commander in Afghanistan, has asked for 40,000 additional troops.

Earlier this year, Harman spoke at the inaugural conference of the neoconservative Foreign Policy Initiative (FPI), Bill Kristol’s reincarnation of the Project for a New American Century. FPI has been advocating fiercely in favor of a surge in Afghanistan. Reporting from the FPI conference at the time, The Wonk Room’s Matt Duss wrote:

To her credit, Harman acknowledged the negative effect of the Iraq war on the Afghanistan mission, stating that “we have under-resourced Afghanistan for too long, we took our eye off the ball when we went into Iraq. All of our resources were devoted to that effort.” Harman also said that the Obama administration must do a better job describing metrics for progress Afghanistan, and that the Congress has an important role to play in holding the administration accountable for whether benchmarks are being met.

She concluded at the time that the President was “on the right track,” and that “we have to hold this administration accountable for its plan in Afghanistan.” It appears Harman is now more concerned about the track Obama is pursuing.

Rove: Bush Administration Never Rejected A Request For More Troops From Afghanistan Commanders »

This morning on ABC’s Good Morning America, former Bush adviser Karl Rove advised President Obama to “pay very close attention to the people you have put in command of the operation in Afghanistan” for their recommendations on strategy. Host Diane Sawyer than pointed out that if we’re listening to Gen. Stanley McChrystal and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Adm. Mike Mullen, they’re saying that “the reason we’re in the situation we’re in now is that this war was under-resourced, including during the Bush administration years.”

Rove quickly disputed those comments, saying, “I don’t believe that at the time, the military was saying we need significantly more. If there had been that cry, I suspect the previous administration would have been very responsive to it.” When Sawyer asked him if he was blaming the generals for not asking for more troops, Rove replied:

ROVE: No, I’m not. No. No. No. I’m saying that the United States had what, at the time, the military felt was an appropriate level of resources, and in retrospect, everybody now, says, I suspect, I wish we would have been doing more because the enemy, particularly as Iraq got better, the jihadists and al Qaeda needed a place to go, and they went to the Horn of Africa and they went to Pakistan and began to revitalize the efforts to attack Afghanistan.

As that grew, additional resources were sent by this administration and the previous administration to Afghanistan. But in retrospect, I think a lot of military experts say, we wish we would have been doing more. But that wasn’t what was going on at the time.

Watch it:

In 2008, Gen. David D. McKiernan, then the top U.S. commander in Kabul, specifically asked the Bush administration for more troops for Afghanistan, but was rebuffed:

“There was a saying when I got there: If you’re in Iraq and you need something, you ask for it,” McKiernan said in his first interview since being fired. “If you’re in Afghanistan and you need it, you figure out how to do without it.” By late last summer, he decided to tell George W. Bush’s White House what he knew it did not want to hear: He needed 30,000 more troops. He wanted to send some to the country’s east to bolster other U.S. forces, and some to the south to assist overwhelmed British and Canadian units in Helmand and Kandahar provinces.

The Bush administration opted not to act on McKiernan’s request and instead set out to persuade NATO allies to contribute more troops.

The war in Iraq was the main reason that Afghanistan was under-resourced. In July 2008, Mullen said, “I don’t have troops I can reach for, brigades I can reach to send into Afghanistan until I have a reduced requirement in Iraq.” Military officials have said that the Taliban was pretty much gone in 2002, but regrouped when the Bush administration decided to shift resources and invade Iraq.

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Discussing Afghanistan, McCain Dodges Question On ‘Whether We Should Have’ Invaded Iraq

Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) has been a regular face on the Sunday morning talk shows this year, primarily because, as ABC’s George Stephanopoulos has said, he “is the leading GOP voice on Afghanistan” (despite the fact that he has consistently been wrong about the war there.)

McCain made his 14th Sunday show appearance since January on CNN today to discuss Afghanistan. During the interview, McCain again called on President Obama to ramp up U.S. troop levels there, modeled after the “surge” in Iraq. “Many see a parallel to Iraq in the sense that it’s been eight years in Afghanistan now it has been billions of dollars” and “we have shed American blood there,” host John King said. But McCain didn’t want to go there:

MCCAIN: First of all, rightly or wrongly we were focused on Iraq. I happened to believe we had to win there. Whether we should have gone in or not, weapons of mass destruction, you covered on other days.

Watch it:

McCain probably doesn’t want to discuss “whether we should have gone in” to Iraq or WMD because at the time, he got it all wrong. Just like Bush administration officials, he hyped the Saddam-Al Qaeda link and Iraq’s non-existent WMDs and said war in Iraq would be easy and that Sunnis and Shias would “probably get along” after Saddam because there was “not a history of clashes” between them.

And as New York Times columnist Frank Rich noted in a scathing column today on McCain, it isn’t all that clear how much the “surge” contributed to reducing violence there or if that strategy can be transferred to Afghanistan. But also, Rich noted that, “What’s more mortifying still is that McCain was just as wrong about Afghanistan”:

Two years after 9/11 he was claiming that we could “in the long term” somehow “muddle through” in Afghanistan. (He now has the chutzpah to accuse President Obama of wanting to “muddle through” there.) Even after the insurgency accelerated in Afghanistan in 2005, McCain was still bragging about the “remarkable success” of that prematurely abandoned war. In 2007, some 15 months after the Pakistan president Pervez Musharraf signed a phony “truce” ceding territory on the Afghanistan border to terrorists, McCain gave Musharraf a thumb’s up. As a presidential candidate in the summer of 2008, McCain cared so little about Afghanistan it didn’t even merit a mention among the national security planks on his campaign Web site.

If McCain has been so demonstrably wrong about these wars in the past, why is the Beltway media so eager to call on him time and time again for his views on Iraq and Afghanistan?

Kristol Floats ‘Plausible Rumor’ That Hagel Will Replace Gates, Calls Him ‘An Advocate Of Retreat Everywhere’

Yesterday, Foreign Policy Initiative co-founder Bill Kristol appeared on Hugh Hewitt’s radio show, where he said that he now believes “for the first time that he will not accept General McChrystal’s recommendation in Afghanistan.” “I really worry now about the next few years to a degree and in a way that I really hadn’t before,” said Kristol.

When Hewitt asked him if a resignation by one of Obama’s top foreign policy advisers “would mobilize public opinion” against Obama’s decisions, Kristol said “it would help.” He added that he had “just heard this morning from someone who’s been in touch with people in the administration, a foreign gentleman who deals with this government, that people are talking about Secretary Gates leaving at the end of the year, and being replaced by Chuck Hagel.” Hewitt and Kristol then took the opportunity to attack Hagel:

KRISTOL: People are talking about Secretary Gates leaving at the end of the year, and being replaced by Chuck Hagel…

HEWITT: Ugh.

KRISTOL: Yeah, exactly, as Secretary of Defense. I think that’s quite a plausible rumor, and a very worrisome one, because he is an advocate of retreat everywhere, I think.

HEWITT: Yeah, it’s sort of neoisolationism replacing neoconservatism as the driving intellectual force behind the intellectuals on either side.

Kristol is typically off-base when he describes Hagel as “an advocate of retreat everywhere.” Instead, Hagel is simply in favor of smarter engagement with the world. As he wrote in the Washington Post earlier this month, “global collaboration does not mean retreating from our standards, values or sovereignty”:

Development of seamless networks of intelligence gathering and sharing, and strengthening alliances, diplomatic cooperation, trade and development can make the biggest long-term difference and have the most lasting impact on building a more stable and secure world. There really are people and organizations committed to destroying America, and we need an agile, flexible and strong military to face these threats. How, when and where we use force are as important as the decision to use it. Relying on the use of force as a centerpiece of our global strategy, as we have in recent years, is economically, strategically and politically unsustainable and will result in unnecessary tragedy — especially for the men and women, and their families, who serve our country.

Indeed, Kristol has long been antithetical towards Hagel’s concern with thinking through the potential negative consequences of military engagement. Before the Iraq war — which Hagel supported before becoming an aggressive critic — Hagel wanted to know, “What comes after a military invasion? Who rules Iraq? Does the United States really want to be in Baghdad, trying to police Baghdad for twenty or thirty years?” Kristol dismissed Hagel with the assertion that “predictions of ethnic turmoil in Iraq are even more questionable than they were in the case of Afghanistan.” Kristol was wrong.

Perhaps, Kristol is lashing out because Hagel has so publicly chastised the foreign policy vision that Kristol supports. In his book, America: Our Next Chapter, Hagel wrote: “So why did we invade Iraq? I believe it was the triumph of the so-called neo-conservative ideology, as well as Bush administration arrogance and incompetence that took America into this war of choice … They obviously made a convincing case to a president with very limited national security and foreign policy experience, who keenly felt the burden of leading the nation in the wake of the deadliest terrorist attack ever on American soil.”

John McCain Criticizes John McCain For Wanting To ‘Muddle Through’ In Afghanistan

In a Wall Street Journal op-ed calling for further escalation in Afghanistan, Sens. John McCain (R-AZ), Lindsey Graham (R-SC), and Joe Liebermen (I-CT) specifically reject a previous contention made by McCain himself. The senators claim that under-resourcing the Afghanistan effort “is a recipe for quagmire and collapse of political support for the war at home”:

Mr. Obama was right when he said last year that “You don’t muddle through the central front on terror . . . You don’t muddle through stamping out the Taliban.”

Asked about Afghanistan back in Nov. 2003, McCain stressed that Iraq was the more important effort, but that he thought that we would be able to “muddle through”:

MCCAIN: I am concerned about it, but I’m not as concerned as I am about Iraq today — obviously, or I’d be talking about Afghanistan — but I believe that if Karzai can make the progress that he is making, that in the long term we may muddle through in Afghanistan.

Watch it:

None of the three hawkish senators, all of whom shilled relentlessly for the invasion of Iraq, have ever owned up to the now widely-accepted fact that the diversion of troops and resources and attention away from Afghanistan toward Iraq was the critical factor in the resurrection of the Taliban insurgency. Read more at the Wonk Room.

ACLU Sends Defense Department Letter Requesting Information About Bagram Detainees

Yesterday the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) sent a letter to the Department of Defense asking them to reconsider releasing information — such as “a list of names, citizenship, length of detention, [and] capture location” — about detainees held at the detention facility at Bagram air base in Afghanistan. The ACLU explains its decision to request the information on its “Blog of Rights“:

Today, we sent a letter to the Department of Defense (DOD), asking them to reconsider their refusal to turn over information about the detention facility at Bagram in Afghanistan. The request is connected to the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request we filed earlier this year with the Departments of Defense, Justice and State and the CIA for documents related to the detention and treatment of prisoners at Bagram. [...]

There is concern that Bagram has become, in effect, another Guantánamo – except with many more prisoners, less due process, no access to lawyers or courts and reportedly worse conditions. Although the nation is embroiled in an intense public debate about U.S. policy pertaining to the detention and treatment of prisoners in U.S. custody, Americans remain in the dark about even the most basic facts about Bagram. And, as long as the Bagram prison is shrouded in secrecy, there is no way to know the truth or begin to address the problems that exist there.

There is no doubt that the Obama Administration has done much to reverse the Bush Administration’s disastrous record on civil liberties. Immediately after coming into office, Obama issued executive orders mandating the closure of the Guantanamo Bay prison camp and banning torture.

Yet civil liberties advocates continue to warn that the same “legal black hole” that existed thanks to the Bush Administration’s policies in Guantanamo Bay has continued to exist in the Bagram detention center. As Tina Foster of the International Justice Center told NPR recently, the policies in Bagram seem to imply that “individuals captured by the United States anywhere in the world can be taken into custody and held indefinitely without charge, so long as they’re not brought to Guantanamo.”