09/21/10 – Matthew Hoh – The Scott Horton Show

Alright everybody, welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton, and I'm about to talk with Matthew Ho, and I'm desperately stalling and trying to pull up his bio too late here, and I'll try again.
He's a former Marine Corps captain, former State Department employee in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Welcome to the show, Matthew.
How are you doing?
Good, Scott.
Thanks for having me on.
I'm sorry, I'm way behind this week.
Could you please introduce yourself a little bit better?
Yeah, no, no, you're pretty good there, Scott.
Yeah, I served in the Marine Corps for ten years, including command of a company in Iraq in 2006-2007, and I worked on State Department teams in both Iraq and Afghanistan, most recently in Afghanistan in 2009.
I'm now the director of the Afghanistan Study Group.
We're a network of foreign policy and public policy professionals, or practitioners, or experts who are advocating for a change in strategy in Afghanistan.
Okay, now, in 2006, James Baker, Sandra Day O'Connor, Vernon Jordan, and many extremely powerful establishment players came together to basically try to provide George Bush an out from the Iraq War, would have had us down to current troop levels or lower by 2008, if I remember right, and instead they went with the surge.
But that, if I remember correctly, sir, that commission was appointed by Congress.
It was an act of Congress that set that study group in motion.
Was this the same thing, or this was just Steve Clemons said, let's try to get some people together to do this on an ad hoc basis?
Yeah, we are definitely not a formally organized or funded effort.
It was just kind of as you described, Steve Clemons about ten months ago said, you know, we need to pull people together and start questioning the assumptions of this war, start questioning the strategic purposes of it, not question like whether we're doing it right at the tactical or operational level, but like, are our purposes there even matching up with what our vital interests are?
Our goal, one of our goals is to see the creation of something similar to the Iraq Study Group, a formal commission that would actually provide a plan, provide an alternative to the current strategy as to what, as well as to whatever would be, you know, we see come out of the December review by General Petraeus.
Well now, I guess it seems like when you have the neoconservative right who will never back down on anything and have their great echo chamber effect that really what was going on in 06, for example, was, I don't know exactly, to say the establishment is to group a lot of individuals together, but you understand it was sort of a, or at least what I'm getting at necessarily, I'm not saying you agree, but it was, you know, James Baker and Sandra Day O'Connor and these kinds of people, I mean, James Baker III by himself, that means that it's okay to cut and run because James Baker said it's okay to cut and run, right?
Like when William Odom came out and he was General William Odom who was the head of the National Security Agency under Ronald Reagan, so this is ridiculous, we should have been out of here a couple of years ago, let's go, then that makes it a little bit easier for the politicians.
They have a little bit of cover for their right flank, and so, and the establishment assent to their conclusions, that kind of thing, and that's really what you guys are going for here too, right?
Because everybody knows this war is ridiculous, it can't win.
We're not fighting for the majority like in Iraq, we're fighting for the minority that have no legitimacy whatsoever in power, and it's all a big joke, we just need the right group of people to say it's okay for the politicians to admit that or something, am I making sense?
No, you're making, that was very nicely worded, Scott, there's political realities of how policy is made, you know, I don't like it, you don't like it, but it's the reality of it, and so yeah, that is, you know, one of our purposes is to push the debate on Afghanistan to enliven the debate on Afghanistan, to make it much more prominent among the public.
It probably won't happen until after, you know, the congressional midterms, but, I mean, the latest polling puts the, you know, people in disfavor of the Afghan war in the high 50s and into the low 60s, but unfortunately, when you ask voters what their top five concerns are, the Afghan war barely breaks that top five.
I mean, that's understandable, there's a lot going on, and people are so disconnected from this war, you know, very few people know anybody who's serving in it, we're certainly not being taxed, you know, to support it, so if you're, if you don't know somebody who's over there, you're really distanced from it, but certainly getting back to your point about the political reality of it, you know, I mean, hey, in international relations 101, the first thing you get taught is that, you know, foreign policy is ultimately the reflection of domestic politics, and so that, you know, part of our purpose is to enliven debate and enlarge the debate, and not let it get swept under the rug.
If your listeners refer to the Washington Post story from Saturday, or the Wall Street Journal article, I believe, from today, it talks about how senior administration officials are downplaying the significance of the review scheduled for December, well, that should not be the case, we should have an actual real debate on this war, and not just have a review that just rubber stamps the current policy.
Well, I note here, Steve Clemens has a piece at politico.com, rethinking US war in Afghanistan, where he sort of is giving an introduction to your study group here, and he quotes Henry Kissinger, saying Afghanistan has never been pacified by foreign forces, and it seems like, come on, if Kissinger says, don't bother with continuing killing people, like, can we call this thing off yet?
I don't know.
I mean, right now it is frustrating.
I just had a note sent to me right before I came back in my office and got on the phone with you guys, and so I haven't been able to check the veracity of the quote, but supposedly Colin Powell referenced Afghanistan in the last day or two, and said some of the lines of, it doesn't look like we're winning there, it doesn't look like this is going to work out, you know?
So again, you've got men like Colin Powell, you had, last July, you had Fareed Zakaria, and then Richard Haass, you know, the former president of the Council of Foreign Relations, and now the current president of the Council of Foreign Relations, you know, one week from each other come out and say, this isn't worth it, we're not winning, and it's not worth it anyhow.
Zakaria's the new president of the Council of Foreign Relations?
No, he's the previous president, and so Richard Haass is the current, yeah.
Oh, okay.
I mean, you had those guys one to each other, you know, one week after the next, you know, I mean, so you're having, to get back to your point about the establishment, key establishment figures, you know, now saying, hey, you know, we gave you a year.
Last year, when the review was going on, we didn't pass judgment, we said, let's see if this works, and a year later, it obviously is not working, it's not even that not working, but it's counterproductive.
The Taliban has grown in size since last year, and there are certainly any metric you look at in terms of casualties, whether it's civilian casualties, or coalition casualties, or IED attacks, or anything, assassinations, it's all trended negatively for the last, not just the last year, but the last three, four, or five years.
So it's a counterproductive strategy, not just failing, but it's making the enemy or the opposition in Afghanistan stronger, and it's destabilizing not just Afghanistan, but most of the entire region.
Well, and you said this while you were still in your official capacity, and then quit, right?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Or were you fired?
No, no, I quit, I quit, I quit.
If I hadn't fired, I probably would have been able to get severance.
Oh, right, yeah, gotta get your severance pay there.
That's my money, by the way.
All right, so, well, tell us about the circumstances of that.
What was it that you wrote?
I remember reading it in the Post, but it's been a while here.
Sure, it was just about a year ago, you know, and if, like we talked about earlier, my background, my goal was to be a career government civil servant, you know, to be a policy guy, either State Department, Department of Defense, or, you know, intelligence community.
But after doing this every day for seven years, you know, a couple times in Iraq, now in Afghanistan, and being here in D.C. working on this every day, you know, I just had enough, mainly with our leadership.
You know, the things I saw in Afghanistan last year were so very similar to the mistakes and the, you know, the dishonesty, the lack of critical thinking, the lack of intellectual honesty that pervaded our policymaking, you know, so from 2003 through 2006 in Iraq, I found that to be the same in Afghanistan.
So there were a number of different reasons why I resigned, but ultimately it comes back to that.
Well, let's hold it right there.
That's a good place to pick it up after the break.
We'll be right back, everybody, with Matthew Ho, Rethinking U.S. War in Afghanistan.
It's at politico.com right now.
Check out the New America Foundation website for more.
All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
Santel War Radio.
On the phone is Matthew Ho.
He's a former Marine and State Department officer.
We're talking about why he quit his State Department job.
Let me ask you real quick.
Are you now with the New America Foundation yourself?
No, I'm actually now a senior fellow over at the Center for International Policy and the Afghanistan Study Group.
And we have a website.
The Center for International Policy.
Now, which one is that?
That's one of the many think tanks here in D.C.
I mean, if you come visit.
My head is swimming with acronyms.
All kinds.
Yep.
We are CIP here.
It's been around for 20, 25 years or maybe a little longer.
A lot of issues with Central America, with South America.
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Wait.
Is that the same group?
Changed their name, but are the guys that they write web.com?
I do not know.
Yeah.
I mean, I can't keep track.
I'm sorry.
Let's get back to the point.
You know, and Scott, I'm new to this.
You know, I didn't read blogs really before this last year.
I mean, I worked in D.C. in the government, but I wasn't involved in the think tank crowd or different policy or advocacy groups.
So I'm still learning my way through the system here.
Oh, that's all right.
Yeah.
I used to always think that George Bush should have read Antiwar.com.
He would have known that Richard Perl and them were using him as a big fool.
We all knew that before it worked.
You know, he went ahead and anyway.
So, look, when we went out to the break, you were talking about how just the incompetence of the administration of the wars in Iraq and in Afghanistan is what made you really finally say nuts to this.
But I say, yeah, but that's before the heroic General David Petraeus, whose surges always work and can do anything and will be the greatest president in American history sometime very soon, came and took charge.
And with his genius, even though he had kind of a big mouth, but awesome, excellent Delta Force operator, General Stanley McChrystal.
And those guys, they know what they're doing.
No more McKiernan.
No more, you know, all that WikiLeaks data about all these IED attacks doing nothing but increase and increase and increase and increase and more and more insurgents and more and more people joining the rebellion in Afghanistan.
That all doesn't count because that all ends last December.
And since then, the new guys rode in on their white horses and now Petraeus himself is in charge of the war.
And so how could anything possibly go wrong?
Well, if you look at it in a sense that I do and many others do as well, that we really haven't changed our strategy in Afghanistan since 2004, 2005.
And if you look up the New York Times from, I believe it was February of 04 or maybe April of 04, General Barna, who was the commanding general at that point, said we're doing counterinsurgency now.
We've been doing counterinsurgency in Afghanistan since, you know, for the last five years or so or maybe longer.
It's just a question now we're doing it larger and bigger, recovering more ground.
And all it's doing is increase the size of insurgency.
It's increased the casualties.
It's decreased support for the Karzai government.
So this idea that we're now doing, we finally got the right strategy, I find completely specious and it's not borne out by the evidence on the ground there.
And in the same way, too, the idea that the increase in troops in Iraq was what helped stabilize Iraq in 2007, it was important.
I mean, I was there in 06, 07.
It was good to get a couple thousand extra Marines into Anbar province, but I'll be the first to say if there are five or six reasons for the stability that, or I mean, stability in quotes.
I mean, Iraq is still far from being, you know, a stable nation, but it's better than it was, say, four years ago.
That stability was, for a bunch of different reasons, I would say the extra troops, that troop surge we hear so much about, was probably reason number five or six out of several reasons for the stability in Iraq post-2007.
Well, and they made things worse in the Sauderist eastern Baghdad.
All they did was pick a giant fight and a Shiite rebellion when Sauder had been basically sitting back.
He's in the catbird seat after all.
Why fight?
Yeah.
I've got a great friend.
He's trying to get a book published right now about his time in Baghdad in 03 and into 04 and talks about how when they first, when he was in Sauder City, and talks about how originally Sauder tried to work with us and talk with us and we just ignored him to the point of disrespect and basically pushed him into the position he was in.
Yeah, they seized his newspaper.
I remember former Congressman Bob Dornan on TV going, Yeah, well we had to seize his newspaper because he's saying outrageous, anti-American things and we're going to shut him down and that's going to save the lives of soldiers.
And then the next day, a massive battle in Sauder City when Casey Sheehan was killed, when young, is it Anthony, I'm sorry, I forget the young man's name, that Donahue did the great, Phil Donahue did the great documentary about, who got one through the spine, who I met at Camp Casey back in 2005.
Good young men died over picking a fight with Muqtada al-Sauder who they invaded the country and basically handed over to them whether they knew it or not.
Apparently they never did.
It's amazing, when you do it and you're over there and you go back and reflect upon it, how much we just didn't understand, how much we didn't know, how much hubris and arrogance involved in all this, and how much we just made stuff worse than it ever, ever needed to be.
And again, I'm not arguing that the invasion was right, far from it, trust me, I'll go to my grave convinced that was the worst mistake of this century.
Our own arrogance and hubris.
The first decade anyway.
God forbid we have anything worse than that, holy cow, we'd be in trouble.
With Afghanistan, the idea that our presence there fuels the insurgency.
That's the second recommendation, and probably the one that strikes most with your listeners, is the idea that we call for the withdrawal of combat forces, of American and NATO combat forces from southern Afghanistan, that we talk about sizable troop withdrawals for the next couple of years.
And my own call has been consistently since last year for a ceasefire, because the combat there is serving no purpose but just to engender a cycle of combat.
And so I believe that most of your listeners probably identify with that second one the most, since I'm on anti-war radio.
But yeah, if your listeners have not looked at our report, you can find it at AfghanistanStudyGroup.org.
If you agree with the report, please share it, and call your congressman.
If you don't agree with the report, call your congressman anyway.
The one thing I'll say is that I've spent a lot of time in...
Wait a minute, let me ask you.
It sounds like that is basically de facto dividing Afghanistan in half, and so just getting the hell out of there, man.
No, no, I'm completely against that, completely against the idea of partition.
When I was there, and my time here, I just met with a representative from Hezbi Islami, which is the second largest insurgent group in Afghanistan, just last week, and any Afghan-Americans I speak with, as well as the Afghans I met in my five months or so over there.
No, the idea of partition is something that is not...
Well, I mean, if the forces all withdraw to the areas where it's mostly Uzbeks, Hazaras, and Tajiks, and out of the Pashtun areas where most of the rebellion is, then what are you doing, and how long are you going to stay there and up in the northwest part?
Well, that all comes down to negotiations, but at least it gets you to negotiations.
It's something anyway.
Look, I really appreciate the effort to just change the politics of this thing.
I mean, frankly, Charles Kruthammer and William Crystal still dictate what's a reasonable discussion in this society on foreign policy somehow, and somebody's got to do something about it.
I really appreciate you and Steve Clemons and all you guys who worked on this for doing something, Matthew.
Well, thank you, Scott.
I appreciate your time.
All right, I appreciate yours as well, everybody.
That's Matthew Ho, he's with the...
I forgot what it was called again.
Something, something, something.
And look at AfghanistanStudyGroup.org.
A new way forward.