For my media friends:
Does Saturday’s U.S.-Taliban Deal Mean Peace for Afghanistan? — Interviews Available
MATTHEW HOH, matthew_hoh@riseup.net
Hoh resigned his position as a State Department political officer in Afghanistan in 2009 in protest of the Obama administration’s escalation of the war. Prior to being in Afghanistan, Hoh was a U.S. Marine Corps officer and was in the war in Iraq twice, once with the Marines and once on a State Department team. Since 2010, Hoh has been a senior fellow with the Center for International Policy.
He said today: “The first part of a peace deal for Afghanistan, set to be signed Saturday between the U.S. government and the Afghan Taliban in Doha, Qatar, has a host of uncertainties attached to it, both in terms of the details of the agreement and what the deal between the U.S. and the Taliban means for the Afghan people. What is not uncertain is the immense suffering the Afghan people have endured and that this is a peace process that could have begun years ago.
“Afghanistan has been at war for more than 40 years. For all 40 years, the war in Afghanistan has been funded, supported and participated in by outside nations — in all but seven of those years the U.S. has been involved as one of those outside powers, including supporting Afghan Islamist militants in the year prior to the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 and for four years after the Soviet Union exited. The suffering of the Afghan people has resulted from a myriad of causes, yet seemingly only those who are either on the payroll of the U.S. government or whose legacy is tied to the U.S. role in Afghanistan will not offer that the largest reason for the suffering of the Afghan people and the continued devastation of Afghanistan has been U.S. war and political policy.
“The war in Afghanistan has been a mirror for the United States for the last 40 years — the dysfunction of the U.S. political system, America’s failed war on drugs, the prioritization of war over all else, and the blowback from ignorant and arrogant decision-making is revealed through the war in Afghanistan as a fundamentally American story. By no means has the U.S. endured the costs that Afghanistan and its people have endured, yet it should be lost on no one that Afghanistan is as much an American story as it is anything else.”
Some of Hoh’s recent writings relevant to the war in Afghanistan include: “Time for Peace in Afghanistan and an End to the Lies,” “And the Armies That Remained Suffer’d: Veterans, Moral Injury and Suicide,” “Authorizations for Madness; The Effects and Consequences of Congress’ Endless Permissions for War” and “The Killing of General Soleimani: Hail Mars! Hail Pluto!”
In the past year, Hoh has been interviewed a number of times regarding the war in Afghanistan, including on C-SPAN and “Democracy Now.”
For more information, contact at the Institute for Public Accuracy:
Sam Husseini, (202) 347-0020, (202) 421-6858; David Zupan, (541) 484-9167
February 28, 2020
Institute for Public Accuracy
980 National Press Building, Washington, D.C. 20045
(202) 347-0020 * accuracy.org * ipa@accuracy.org
@accuracy * ipaccuracy
Matthew Hoh 
Good Day, Have you thought to send this and other info to the White House ? It may be something that the President Mr. Trump would consider. Regards.
Sent from Mail for Windows 10
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Your article about Buttigieg’s service was garbage; tendentious, snide and, worst of all, poorly researched. You can find out more about his intelligence training, what his fellow sailors thought of him and his service, and why he went into intelligence. This information is easily available, in news articles, or reading his book. Instead you base your article on his redacted military records, and fill in the gaps with your prejudices and biases.
Buttigieg had already traveled to Afghanistan and Iraq as a civilian contractor when working for McKinsey. He had language skills and knowledge of business and finance. He’s never claimed to have been a combat infantryman, but he did risk his life every time he went outside the wire. His base came under regular Taliban rocket attack. It’s not surprising the navy promoted him, or that after returning from Afghanistan he was made “CT Team Lead: Supervises 2 officers and 5 intelligence analysts”.
Your desperate need to diminish his service at every turn (claiming falsely he was assigned to naval intelligence because it was the closest station… it was not; claiming he didn’t actually do any work in an intelligence capacity in Afghanistan) ends up revealing far more about you than it does Buttigieg, It clearly goes beyond a mere political difference, somehow the sole gay candidate in the race has been the recipient of the most sustained vitriol and abuse of any of Bernie’s competitor, 10x worse than Biden or Klobuchar received. For some reason, you couldn’t just write an article critiquing his policy positions, you had to make it a deeply personal attack on his integrity.
Your judgment about the implications of the Soleimani strike was trash. Nothing you predicted came to pass. You are just as wrong about Buttigieg, but I suppose it’s the nature of cognitive blindspots (and prejudice/bigotry) that the person in question doesn’t know what they don’t know, or how limited their understanding is.
People are sick and tired of the sneering, snide, negative, abusive and arrogant attitude of the Bernie bros. Perhaps we’ve had just the first taste of karma on Tuesday this week.
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Please provide the sources for your assertions.
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