It's Time for Us to Go

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Brennan Linsley / AP Photo Get out of Afghanistan now, Mr. President. And here’s why.

I’ve lived in Washington since 1981 and have been a faithful reader of The Washington Post ever since. I think I could count on the fingers of one hand the number of times I have seen the word “resign” in a front-page headline. So when that word does appear, it’s a true “bacon-cooler” moment, to use the industry term for a story so arresting that your hand pauses en route to your mouth and the bacon goes cold while you read, spellbound, to the end of the story.

If you have not seen Karen DeYoung’s Oct 27 story, “U.S. Official Resigns Over Afghan War”, you owe it to yourself, your country, and our soldiers over there to read it. But even more powerful than Ms. DeYoung’s stunner of a scoop is the accompanying letter of resignation itself of Matthew P. Hoh, the 36-year old Marine-turned-Foreign Service Officer. It is a cry of conscience and an indictment of our continued presence in Afghanistan.

One doesn’t envy Mr. Obama, but he’s the Decider now.

One can only pray—I use the word literally—that President Obama will read it before he makes his fateful decision about where we go from here in Afghanistan. One doesn’t envy Mr. Obama, but he’s the Decider now. To quote John Kenneth Galbraith, father of Peter Galbraith, who was recently sacked from his U.N. job for making too much of an impolitic fuss over Karzai’s blatant electoral thievery in Afghanistan, “Politics is not the art of the possible. It consists in choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable.”

Since you are reading this post on a computer, you’ll be able to read Mr. Hoh’s letter yourself. I won’t recapitulate it all here—it demands to be read in its entirety. But to limn some of his more salient points….

In essence, he says, the U.S. is little more than a “supporting actor” in a long running tragedy of Afghanistan’s now 35-year-old civil war.

Reading his letter, I thought of the famous exchange between the Confederate soldier and his Yankee captor.

Why do you hate us so, Johnny Reb?

Because this is our land, and you’re on it.

• Walter Russell Mead: Why Saving Afghanistan Requires Cutting Deals with Shady People

• Michael Smerconish: Musharraf on Fixing Pakistan and the Afghan SurgeMr. Hoh writes that “like the Soviets”—a phrase to send a shudder up any American spine—“we continue to secure and bolster a failing state, while encouraging an ideology and system of government unknown and unwanted by its people.” The bulk of the insurgents, he says, are fighting not under the flag of the Taliban but against the presence of foreign soldiers.

The situation, he writes, “reminds me horribly of our involvement with South Vietnam; an unpopular and corrupt government we backed at the expense of our nation’s own internal peace, against an insurgency whose nationalism we arrogantly and ignorantly mistook as a rival to our own Cold War ideology.”

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