November’s B-side
November’s B-side covers a wide canvas and begins by looking at the vitroil directed at Pakistan and her nuclear status in the form of continous allegations of proliferation by Dr AQ Khan. The second article looks at the potential of the wider South Asia region if the IPI gas pipeline dream is realised linking Pakistan with Iran and India . The final article centres on Afghanistan and at Matthew Hoh’s resignation letter, the now famous and for some infamous official who has resigned from the US Foreign Service for its flawed policies in Afghanistan.
November’s B-side contents include:
- A Nuclear Power’s Act of Proliferation by R. JEFFERY SMITH & JOBY WARWICK
- Energising Peace by SALEEM H. ALI & PARAG KHANNA
- Resignation Letter by MATTHEW HOH
The first article is an article if I can call it that, which claims to detail Pakistan’s nuclear proliferation story and is a charge sheet against the land of the pure.
A Nuclear Power’s Act of Proliferation by R. Jeffery Smith & Joby Warwick
In 1982, a Pakistani military C-130 left the western Chinese city of Urumqi with a highly unusual cargo: enough weapons-grade uranium for two atomic bombs, according to accounts written by the father of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons program, Abdul Qadeer Khan, and provided to The Washington Post.
The uranium transfer in five stainless-steel boxes was part of a broad-ranging, secret nuclear deal approved years earlier by Mao Zedong and Prime Minister Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto that culminated in an exceptional, deliberate act of proliferation by a nuclear power, according to the accounts by Khan, who is under house arrest in Pakistan.
U.S. officials say they have known about the transfer for decades and once privately confronted the Chinese — who denied it — but have never raised the issue in public or sought to impose direct sanctions on China for it. President Obama, who said in April that “the world must stand together to prevent the spread of these weapons,” plans to discuss nuclear proliferation issues while visiting Beijing on Tuesday.
According to Khan, the uranium cargo came with a blueprint for a simple weapon that China had already tested, supplying a virtual do-it-yourself kit that significantly speeded Pakistan’s bomb effort. The transfer also started a chain of proliferation: U.S. officials worry that Khan later shared related Chinese design information with Iran in 2003, Libya confirmed obtaining it from Khan’s clandestine network.
China’s refusal to acknowledge the transfer and the unwillingness of the United States to confront the Chinese publicly demonstrate how difficult it is to counter nuclear proliferation. Although U.S. officials say China is now much more attuned to proliferation dangers, it has demonstrated less enthusiasm than the United States for imposing sanctions on Iran over its nuclear efforts, a position Obama wants to discuss.
Although Chinese officials have for a quarter-century denied helping any nation attain a nuclear capability, current and former U.S. officials say Khan’s accounts confirm the U.S. intelligence community’s long-held conclusion that China provided such assistance.
“Upon my personal request, the Chinese Minister . . . had gifted us 50 kg [kilograms] of weapon-grade enriched uranium, enough for two weapons,” Khan wrote in a previously undisclosed 11-page narrative of the Pakistani bomb program that he prepared after his January 2004 detention for unauthorized nuclear commerce.
“The Chinese gave us drawings of the nuclear weapon, gave us kg50 enriched uranium,” he said in a separate account sent to his wife several months earlier.
China’s Foreign Ministry last week declined to address Khan’s specific assertions, but it said that as a member of the global Non-Proliferation Treaty since 1992, “China strictly adheres to the international duty of prevention of proliferation it shoulders and strongly opposes . . . proliferation of nuclear weapons in any forms.”
Asked why the U.S. government has never publicly confronted China over the uranium transfer, State Department spokesman Philip J. Crowley said, “The United States has worked diligently and made progress with China over the past 25 years. As to what was or wasn’t done during the Reagan administration, I can’t say.”
Khan’s exploits have been described in multiple books and public reports since British and U.S. intelligence services unmasked the deeds in 2003. But his own narratives — not yet seen by U.S. officials — provide fresh details about China’s aid to Pakistan and its reciprocal export to China of sensitive uranium-enrichment technology.
A spokesman for the Pakistani Embassy in Washington declined to comment for this article. Pakistan has never allowed the U.S. government to question Khan or other top Pakistani officials directly, prompting Congress to demand in legislation approved in September that future aid be withheld until Obama certifies that Pakistan has provided “relevant information from or direct access to Pakistani nationals” involved in past nuclear commerce.
Insider vs Government
The Post obtained Khan’s detailed accounts from Simon Henderson, a former journalist at the Financial Times who is now a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and who has maintained correspondence with Khan. In a first-person account about his contacts with Khan in the Sept. 20 edition of the London Sunday Times, Henderson disclosed several excerpts from one of the documents.
Henderson said he agreed to The Post’s request for a copy of that letter and other documents and narratives written by Khan because he believes an accurate understanding of Pakistan’s nuclear history is relevant for U.S. policymaking. The Post independently confirmed the authenticity of the material; it also corroborated much of the content through interviews in Pakistan and other countries.
Although Khan disputes various assertions by book authors, the narratives are particularly at odds with Pakistan’s official statements that he exported nuclear secrets as a rogue agent and implicated only former government officials who are no longer living. Instead, he repeatedly states that top politicians and military officers were immersed in the country’s foreign nuclear dealings.
Khan has complained to friends that his movements and contacts are being unjustly controlled by the government, whose bidding he did — providing a potential motive for his disclosures.
Overall, the narratives portray his deeds as a form of sustained, high-tech international horse-trading, in which Khan and a series of top generals successfully leveraged his access to Europe’s best centrifuge technology in the 1980s to obtain financial assistance or technical advice from foreign governments that wanted to advance their own efforts.
“The speed of our work and our achievements surprised our worst enemies and adversaries and the West stood helplessly by to see a Third World nation, unable even to produce bicycle chains or sewing needles, mastering the most advanced nuclear technology in the shortest possible span of time,” Khan boasts in the 11-page narrative he wrote for Pakistani intelligence officials about his dealings with foreigners while head of a key nuclear research laboratory.
Exchanges with Beijing
According to one of the documents, a five-page summary by Khan of his government’s dealmaking with China, the terms of the nuclear exchange were set in a mid-1976 conversation between Mao and Bhutto. Two years earlier, neighboring India had tested its first nuclear bomb, provoking Khan — a metallurgist working at a Dutch centrifuge manufacturer — to offer his services to Bhutto.
Khan said he and two other Pakistani officials — including then-Foreign Secretary Agha Shahi, since deceased — worked out the details when they traveled to Beijing later that year for Mao’s funeral. Over several days, Khan said, he briefed three top Chinese nuclear weapons officials — Liu Wei, Li Jue and Jiang Shengjie — on how the European-designed centrifuges could swiftly aid China’s lagging uranium-enrichment program. China’s Foreign Ministry did not respond to questions about the officials’ roles.
“Chinese experts started coming regularly to learn the whole technology” from Pakistan, Khan states, staying in a guesthouse built for them at his centrifuge research center. Pakistani experts were dispatched to Hanzhong in central China, where they helped “put up a centrifuge plant,” Khan said in an account he gave to his wife after coming under government pressure. “We sent 135 C-130 plane loads of machines, inverters, valves, flow meters, pressure gauges,” he wrote. “Our teams stayed there for weeks to help and their teams stayed here for weeks at a time.”
In return, China sent Pakistan 15 tons of uranium hexafluoride (UF6), a feedstock for Pakistan’s centrifuges that Khan’s colleagues were having difficulty producing on their own. Khan said the gas enabled the laboratory to begin producing bomb-grade uranium in 1982. Chinese scientists helped the Pakistanis solve other nuclear weapons challenges, but as their competence rose, so did the fear of top Pakistani officials that Israel or India might preemptively strike key nuclear sites.
Mohammed Zia ul-Haq, the nation’s military ruler, “was worried,” Khan said, and so he and a Pakistani general who helped oversee the nation’s nuclear laboratories were dispatched to Beijing with a request in mid-1982 to borrow enough bomb-grade uranium for a few weapons.
After winning Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping’s approval, Khan, the general and two others flew aboard a Pakistani C-130 to Urumqi. Khan says they enjoyed barbecued lamb while waiting for the Chinese military to pack the small uranium bricks into lead-lined boxes, 10 single-kilogram ingots to a box, for the flight to Islamabad, Pakistan’s capital.
According to Khan’s account, however, Pakistan’s nuclear scientists kept the Chinese material in storage until 1985, by which time the Pakistanis had made a few bombs with their own uranium. Khan said he got Zia’s approval to ask the Chinese whether they wanted their high-enriched uranium back. After a few days, they responded “that the HEU loaned earlier was now to be considered as a gift . . . in gratitude” for Pakistani help, Khan said.
He said the laboratory promptly fabricated hemispheres for two weapons and added them to Pakistan’s arsenal. Khan’s view was that none of this violated the 1968 Non-Proliferation Treaty, because neither nation had signed it at the time and neither had sought to use its capability “against any country in particular.” He also wrote that subsequent international protests reeked of hypocrisy because of foreign assistance to nuclear weapons programs in Britain, Israel and South Africa.
U.S. Unaware of Progress
The United States was suspicious of Pakistani-Chinese collaboration through this period. Officials knew that China treasured its relationship with Pakistan because both worried about India; they also knew that China viewed Western nuclear policies as discriminatory and that some Chinese politicians had favored the spread of nuclear arms as a path to stability.
But U.S. officials were ignorant about key elements of the cooperation as it unfolded, according to current and former officials and classified documents.
China is “not in favor of a Pakistani nuclear explosive program, and I don’t think they are doing anything to help it,” a top State Department official reported in a secret briefing in 1979, three years after the Bhutto-Mao deal was struck. A secret State Department report in 1983 said Washington was aware that Pakistan had requested China’s help, but “we do not know what the present status of the cooperation is,” according to a declassified copy.
Meanwhile, Chinese Premier Zhao Ziyang promised at a White House dinner in January 1984: “We do not engage in nuclear proliferation ourselves, nor do we help other countries develop nuclear weapons.” A nearly identical statement was made by China in a major summary of its nonproliferation policies in 2003 and on many occasions in between.
Fred McGoldrick, a senior State Department nonproliferation official in the Reagan and Clinton administrations, recalls that the United States learned in the 1980s about the Chinese bomb-design and uranium transfers. “We did confront them, and they denied it,” he said. Since then, the connection has been confirmed by particles on nuclear-related materials from Pakistan, many of which have characteristic Chinese bomb program “signatures,” other officials say.
Hans M. Kristensen, director of the Nuclear Information Project at the Federation of American Scientists, said that except for the instance described by Khan, “we are not aware of cases where a nuclear weapon state has transferred HEU to a non-nuclear country for military use.” McGoldrick also said he is aware of “nothing like it” in the history of nuclear weapons proliferation. But he said nothing has ever been said publicly because “this is diplomacy; you don’t do that sort of thing . . . if you want them to change their behavior.”
Warrick reported from Islamabad. Staff researcher Julie Tate in Washington and Beijing bureau assistant Wang Juan contributed to this report.
Published in Washington Post
WASIM VIEW- The Washington Post is known to Pakistanis for its favourite pastime, we can call it Pakistan pastime and it involves demonising Pakistan on a daily basis. The Smith & Warwick article must be read in that context and is basically a charge-sheet against Pakistan and China and their nuclear partnership.
The crux of the article is that China helped Pakistan in the early stages of our nuclear programme via secret uranium transfer as per a deal done by Mao Zedong and Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto in the late 70’s. More damaging allegations against Pakistan and China (absurd allegations if you ask me) make up the majority of the article with the Washington Post basing its claims on evidence via some supposed correspondence between Dr AQ Khan and one Simon Henderson.
Henderson declares his motivations in sharing these state secrets ‘because he believes an accurate understanding of Pakistan’s nuclear history is relevant for U.S. policymaking’. In that statement Henderson’s motives are made clear for one and all to understand and they need not any elaboration. To conclude the article deserves little attention for it is a soap opera of a story and at best, mere conjecture.
The second article is written by a Pakistani and an Indian and looks at the potential of a South Asia of peace and prosperity via the IPI pipeline and deserves readers attention.
Energising Peace by Saleem. H Ali & Parag Khanna
The lessons of geography appear to be ignored by policymakers in Washington D.C. these days. The Obama administration is pursuing tenuous negotiations with Iran regarding its supply of low-enriched uranium, in the hopes of taking the first step to erase the longstanding animosity between the two countries. It is also rethinking its Afghanistan and Pakistan policy to emphasize reconstruction and economic development. These two strategies are unfortunately disconnected — despite the fact that Afghanistan shares a 600-mile-long strategic border with Iran.
Neither a “surge” of troops and aid in Afghanistan, nor negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program without addressing its regional isolation, will bring Central Asia much closer to stability. The United States must support a policy that addresses the major deficiency all these countries share in common: a lack of clean, affordable energy for their poor populations. Only natural gas pipelines, not military supply lines, can do this.
The United States has so far been ambivalent about using Central Asia’s natural resources to guide its policy, confounding the prospects for pipeline development. Yet without an energy infrastructure, individual U.S. reconstruction programs are going to struggle to get off the ground. For example, the Reconstruction Opportunity Zones (ROZs) established in Pakistan’s tribal areas, which provide goods produced in these areas with duty-free access to the U.S. market, will have little impact without a steady energy supply to fuel local industry. Pipelines and power lines can be a much more significant economic stimulus. By providing energy for power-starved nations, they can empower microeconomic activity through lower fuel and electricity costs.
Natural gas pipelines can also provide an impetus for a diplomatic breakthrough with Iran. Two proposed pipeline routes currently offer the greatest opportunity to solidify regional integration and create lasting stability: the route from Iran via Pakistan to India (IPI), and from Turkmenistan via Afghanistan and Pakistan to India (TAPI). But thus far, the U.S. had sought to hinder international commerce with Iran, lobbying only for pipeline routes that avoid Iranian territory. It actively lobbied against the proposed Iran-Pakistan-India (IPI) project – even despite its tacit acceptance of the pipeline that runs between Iran and Turkey. This Iran-Turkey pipeline, which traverses Turkey’s volatile Kurdish region, also exemplifies how security along such infrastructure can be adequately provided, even in conflict zones.
The IPI pipeline might represent the most promising confidence-building measure with Iran. Furthermore, recent discussions surrounding TAPI actually route it through Iran as well. If this turns out to be the case, it will force the U.S. to accept that the stabilization of Pakistan and Afghanistan requires a rapprochement with Iran. Since demand for gas in South Asia continues to skyrocket, the U.S. should encourage both projects and actively link their implementation to its conflict resolution strategy for the region. Détente with Iran need not wait for a nuclear breakthrough.
Furthermore, depending on the route of the pipeline, Afghanistan could earn as much as $100 million per year from transit fees of pipelines, providing a necessary boost for Afghanistan’s perpetually aid-dependent government.
These pipelines will aid, not hinder, America’s efforts to provide economic relief to Pakistan as well. Even with the fairly high prices for gas Iran offers to Pakistan, IPI could save the country between $652 million and $1.17 billion annually, depending on the price of oil. This is approximately the same amount as the Kerry-Lugar legislation would deliver in non-military aid each year to Pakistan. According to government reports, Pakistan currently has an energy shortfall of between 3000 and 4000 megawatts (MW), while India’s shortfall is estimated to be between 15,000 and 20,000 MW. For this reason, the development of energy projects were a focus of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s recent visit to Islamabad – however, the talks reportedly ignored the regional context of this issue.
Finally, given concerns about climate change, natural gas pipelines offer donors an opportunity to limit the output of carbon emissions. Natural gas is likely to be the cleanest and most cost-effective fuel to meet Pakistan and India’s energy shortfall. Apart from its use in power plants, natural gas is also being used in the transportation sector. The significance of compressed natural gas (CNG) in India was highlighted as early as 1998, when the Supreme Court ruled that all commercial vehicles in New Delhi should switch to natural gas by 2001 due to pollution concerns from diesel and petrol engines. Pakistan already has more than a million cars on CNG and ranks third in global CNG use after Brazil and Argentina. What’s more, while oil is still largely transported across the globe by a fleet of more than 38,000 pollution-causing marine tankers, 93% of the world’s gas continues to be supplied through pipelines.
Natural gas development offers a unique opportunity to tackle strategic, diplomatic, and environmental goals at the same time. Even in the world’s most turbulent region, there is a possibility for renewed trade along what ancient merchants knew as the Silk Road.
If we genuinely want to stabilize this crisis zone without a heavy American footprint, new energy-based Silk Roads are the solution.
Published in Foreign Policy
WASIM VIEW- The Ali & Khanna article is a good one and is written by a Pakistani and an Indian and is not as far as I know, not another waste of a time of a confidence building measure! The article is nevertheless well worth a read and centres on the potential of the South Asia region based on the use of ‘natural gas pipelines, not military supply lines’.
Ali & Khanna do their best work in showing the key links, moreover the lack of them in terms of US policies towards Pakistan, Iran and Afghanistan. In summary US-Iran relations are not the best and the nuclear issue remains a big stumbling block, meanwhile Afghanistan remains under US occupation under Karzai of Kabul whilst Pakistan suffers from American influence in almost all things Pakistan.
The conclusion Ali & Khanna make and I agree with it is that the US footprint in the region is heavy and failing as opportunities for peace and partnership are neglected and even discouraged by Uncle Sam with the US opposition to the IPI and TAPI gas pipelines being a case in point. The solution is for the US to grow up from its childlike opposition to a partnership approach in the region with Ali & Khanna arguing that ‘natural gas development offers a unique opportunity to tackle strategic, diplomatic, and environmental goals at the same time… If we genuinely want to stabilize this crisis zone without a heavy American footprint, new energy-based Silk Roads are the solution’. I could not agree more.
The final article is a look at Matthew Hoh’s resignation letter, a letter that rocked the US for it detailed US folly in Afghanistan, I need not say any more for the letter does all the talking.
Resignation Letter by Matthew Hoh
US Foreign Service Officer Matthew P. Hoh,
Senior Civilian Representative, Afghanistan
September 10, 2009
Ambassador Nancy J. Powell
Director General of the Foreign Service and Director of Human Resources
U.S. Department of State
2201 C Street NW
Washington, D.C. 20520
Dear Ambassador Powell,
It is with great regret and disappointment I submit my resignation from my appointment as a Political Officer in the Foreign Service and my post as the Senior Civilian Representative for the US Government in Zabul Province. I have served six of the previous ten years in service to our country overseas, to include deployment as a US Marine office and Department of Defense civilian in the Euphrates and Tigris River Valleys of Iraq in 2004-2005 and 2006-2007. I did not enter into this position lightly or with any undue expectations nor did I believe my assignment would be without sacrifice, hardship or difficulty. However, in the course of my five months of service in Afghanistan, in both Regional Commands East and South, I have lost understanding of and confidence in the strategic purposes of the United States’ presence in Afghanistan. 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. To put simply: I fail to see the value or the worth in continued US casualties or expenditures of resources in support of the Afghan government in what is, truly, a 35-year old civil war.
This fall will mark the eighth year of US combat, governance and development operations within Afghanistan. Next fall, the United States’ occupation will equal in length the Soviet Union’s own physical involvement in Afghanistan. Like the Soviets, we continue to secure and bolster a failing state, while encouraging an ideology and system of government unknown and unwanted by its people.
If the history of Afghanistan is one great stage play, the United States is no more than a supporting actor, among several previously, in a tragedy that not only pits tribes, valleys, clans, villages and families against one another, but, from at least the end of King Zahir Shah’s reign, has violently and savagely pitted the urban, secular, educated and modern of Afghanistan against the rural, religious, illiterate and traditional. It is this latter group that composes and supports the Pashtun insurgency. The Pashtun insurgency, which is composed of multiple, seemingly infinite, local groups, 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 US and NATO presence and operations 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. In both RC East and South, I have observed that the bulk of the insurgency fights not for the white banner of the Taliban, but rather against the presence of foreign soldiers and taxes imposed by an unrepresentative government in Kabul.
The United States military presence in Afghanistan greatly contributes to the legitimacy and strategic message of the Pashtun insurgency. In a like manner our backing of the Afghan government in its current form continues to distance the government from the people. The Afghan government’s failings, particularly when weighed against the sacrifice of American lives and dollars, appear legion and metastatic:
Our support for this kind of government, coupled with a misunderstanding of the insurgency’s true nature, 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.
I find specious the reasons we ask for bloodshed and sacrifice from our young men and women in Afghanistan. If honest, our stated strategy of securing Afghanistan to prevent al-Qaeda resurgence or regrouping would require us to additionally invade and occupy western Pakistan, Somalia, Sudan, Yemen, etc. Our presence in Afghanistan has only increased destabilization and insurgency in Pakistan where we rightly fear a toppled or weakened Pakistani government may lose control of its nuclear weapons. However, again, to follow the logic of our stated goals we should garrison Pakistan, not Afghanistan. More so, the September 11th attacks, as well as the Madrid and London bombings, were primarily planned and organized in Western Europe; a point that highlights the threat is not one tied to traditional geographic or political boundaries. Finally, if our concern is for a failed state crippled by corruption and poverty and under assault from criminal and drug lords, then if we bear our military and financial contributions to Afghanistan, we must reevaluate and increase our commitment to and involvement in Mexico.
Eight years into war, no nation has ever known a more dedicated, well trained, experienced and disciplined military as the US Armed Forces. I do not believe any military force has ever been tasked with such a complex, opaque and Sisyphean mission as the US military has received in Afghanistan. The tactical proficiency and performance of our Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen and Marines is unmatched and unquestioned. However, this is not the European or Pacific theaters of World War II, but rather is a war for which our leaders, uniformed, civilian and elected, have inadequately prepared and resourced our men and women. Our forces, devoted and faithful, have been committed to conflict in an indefinite and unplanned manner that has become a cavalier, politically expedient and Pollyannaish misadventure. Similarly, the United States has a dedicated and talented cadre of civilians, both US government employees and contractors, who believe in and sacrifice for their mission, but they have been ineffectually trained and led with guidance and intent shaped more by the political climate in Washington, DC than in Afghan cities, villages, mountains and valleys.
“We are spending ourselves into oblivion” a very talented and intelligent commander, one of America’s best, briefs every visitor, staff delegation and senior officer. We are mortgaging our Nation’s economy on a war, which, even with increased commitment, will remain a draw for years to come. Success and victory, whatever they may be, will be realized not in years, after billions more spent, but in decades and generations. The United States does not enjoy a national treasury for such success and victory.
I realize the emotion and tone of my letter and ask that you excuse any ill temper. I trust you understand the nature of this war and the sacrifices made by so many thousands of families who have been separated from loved ones deployed in defense of our Nation and whose homes bear the fractures, upheavals and scars of multiple and compounded deployments. Thousands of our men and women have returned home with physical and mental wounds, some that will never heal or will only worsen with time. The dead return only in bodily form to be received by families who must be reassured their dead have sacrificed for a purpose worthy of futures lost, loved vanished, and promised dreams unkept. I have lost confidence such assurances can anymore be made. As such, I submit my resignation.
Sincerely,
Matthew P. Hoh
Senior Civilian Representative
Zabul Province, Afghanistan
Cc: Mr. Frank Ruggiero
Ms. Dawn Liberi
Ambassador Anthony Wayne
Ambassador Karl Eikenberry
Published in Antiwar.com
WASIM VIEW- In the very first paragraph of his resignation letter, Hoh is crystal clear and damning in his verdict (even General McChrystal clear) that he has lost ‘understanding of and confidence in the strategic purposes of the United States’ presence in Afghanistan’. Hoh rightly draws comparisons with the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan and concludes of the US that ‘we continue to secure and bolster a failing state, while encouraging an ideology and system of government unknown and unwanted by its people’.
Hoh speaks more home-truths later in his later and is right to equate the problems of Afghanistan to a ‘pashtun insurgency’. Hoh is right also in drawing parallels with Vietnam and for declaring that the US can aim for a draw at best. The blatant contradictions in the US policy of preventing an Al-Qaeda resurgence in Afghanistan are laid bare when Hoh rightly makes the point that to achieve such an objective would mean that the US would ‘need to additionally invade and occupy western Pakistan, Somalia, Sudan, Yemen, etc’.
Hoh rounds on the flawed Obama doctrine for Afghanistan by making the point that ’to follow the logic of our stated goals we should garrison Pakistan, not Afghanistan. More so, the September 11th attacks, as well as the Madrid and London bombings, were primarily planned and organized in Western Europe; a point that highlights the threat is not one tied to traditional geographic or political boundaries’.
All in all, Hoh’s resignation letter must be seen as a mayday distress call to an American leadership that is clearly blind to its failures. Just as President Obama prepares to announce a new Afghanistan policy including sending more US troops in the coming days, some choice words in Hoh’s letter act as a warning that will go unheeded and will haunt Obama in years to come, that ‘eight years into war, no nation has ever known a more dedicated, well trained, experienced and disciplined military as the US Armed Forces. I do not believe any military force has ever been tasked with such a complex, opaque and Sisyphean mission as the US military has received in Afghanistan’.