On the Contrary

I am a little person.  No not in stature, I am a fairly big guy, but in political impact.  I have none.  I have always been a doer.  I make a fairly good living because I am good about the details of making something work.  I am fairly perceptive at what is actually going on, but generally I have lived in the shadows of those who chart the strategic course of things.  Generally speaking, I have found my strategic sense, much better than those that are in charge. At least most of the roads taken are not the ones I would have taken, and the results for our country have not turned out well. I saw my frustration at being dismissed as a little person being played out on Meet the Press and CNN’s GPS. It was a contrast in all that is wrong with how we think and I wonder if anybody noticed it?

Fareed Zakaria had as his guest Matthew Hoh, who recently resigned from the State Department Staff in Kabul in protest over our policies there.  Matthew was a marine in Iraq and then a State Department staffer in Afghanistan.  So he saw the area, its conflict, and the people from the ground level.  He was a little person dealing with the day-to-day realities of what really is going on over there.  He actually had to carry out and deal the realities of policy.  Apparently he was offered a position on Ambassador Holbroke’s staff, but in the end he realized that he would have little effect on policy and the direction we were headed would result in more deaths, both Afghan and American, with nothing to show for it.  The transcript of the interview is available at CNN.

What Mr. Hoh described was the reality of Afghanistan.  There is no Afghanistan people as such, just a very rural country with local tribal communities that resent all intrusion into their lives, whether that is the Afghan government, foreign fighters, or the United States.  These people don’t want to be protected; they want to be left alone.  The war as he saw it was an ongoing civil war that has been going on for more than 35 years.  We were simply taking a side in that civil war, and more troops would mean more insurgents, and the war will go on forever.  He found no parallels to Iraq where it was a more urban community where control was greatly simplified.  This is a gross summary and if you care about where we are headed, if you care about those brave Americans we send over there to die, you need to read this transcript or watch the interview.  His final observation is that we need to reduce our presence, not increase it:

ZAKARIA: What will happen if we do not go with the McChrystal plan, or we go to a very small troop increase? What will the troops who are there now do? And should we actually draw down some of these troops?

HOH: Oh, I do believe we should draw down. I do believe we should recognize we’re in a civil war. I do believe we should recognize our priorities are the defeat of al Qaeda and the stabilization of Pakistan.

I’m by no means a Pakistan expert. But increasing troops is only going to fuel insurgency. We need to stop our combat operations in areas where we are fighting people only because they’re fighting us.

Otherwise, it’s going to be 2013, we’re going to look back four years, and we’re going to say, what have we accomplished? What did we get? What was this worth? What did we get out of this?

We might be able to stabilize the Afghan government in five to 10 years with a lot of resources. I believe we can militarily defeat the Quetta Shura in two to three years with a lot of resources and a lot of dead.

However, is it worth it? What do we get out of it? What’s the benefit of us doing it? It doesn’t politically defeat the insurgency in the south. And it doesn’t, more importantly, it doesn’t defeat al Qaeda.

Then I watched Meet the Press and the discussion between Pundits David Gregory, Andrea Mitchell (just back from Afghanistan), and Pentagon correspondent Jim Miklaszewski about Afghanistan.  The country they were talking about was not the same one that Mathew Hoh was talking about.  Miklaszewski talked as though General McChrystal was a personal friend and that all they needed to do was to provide security for the people.  The construct of what Afghanistan was all about was totally different from the reality that Mathew Hoh presented.  And then I got it.  These people know nothing except the image that has been carefully crafted for them and the narrow confines of their own experience.  They have no on-the-ground, in the dirt, personal experience of the reality there.  They are important people.  You have to get really dirty to really know something.  They are creatures of what they are told, not what they have experienced.  They view Afghanistan through the lens of their own experience instead of the alien reality of the real Afghanistan  and what is possible there.

So Matthew Hoh is one of the little people.  He sees reality as it is because he has had to live it, not through the lens of a need for victory, or military supremacy, or some belief in a quick fix or political ideology.  He spoke truth to power and they tried to co-opt him by stroking his ego with a promotion up the chain.  He saw it for what it was, selling his soul for ego with little chance to effect change.  He is only a little person to those in power.  To the rest of us, he is indeed a very big person.  He did not sell his soul for power and advancement.  Thank you Mr. Hoh.

From my perspective there is one more important lesson here and not just about Afghanistan.  It is about how the little people get co-opted when they speak truth to power and how those in power who can really make a difference are mostly those that sold their soul to get that power.  They are not in power to make major changes, but to carry the flag of those who co-opted them.  How else do you explain our Afghanistan, financial, economic, energy, and climate policy?  The way forward is obvious.  But those in power don’t like those answers.  Those damn little people.