Fareed Zakaria talks to former Foreign Service officer Matthew Hoh who recently resigned as a Political Officer in Afghanistan. You can watch the entire interview here.

ZAKARIA: Matthew Hoh is the young Foreign Service officer who resigned this week from his post in Afghanistan. He joins me now.

Matthew, I'm going to just start by reading a bit from your resignation letter. You say, "I fail to see the worth or value in continued U.S. casualties or expenditures of resources in support of the Afghan government in what is truly a 35-year-old civil war."

And then you go on to say, "Thousands of our men and women have returned home with physical and mental wounds. The dead return only in bodily form to be received by families who must be reassured that their dead have been sacrificed for a purpose worthy of such futures lost, love vanished and promised dreams unkept. I have lost confidence such assurances can any more be made. As such, I submit my resignation."

These are very strong words.

Give us some sense of what this insurgency that we are fighting looks like. What did you think people were fighting U.S. troops for?

MATTHEW HOH, FORMER MARINE CAPTAIN AND U.S. STATE DEPARTMENT OFFICIAL: The first place where I really had -- where this was codified for me and where I started to understand what we were doing and how we were involved -- the Korengal Valley, which I'm sure a lot of your viewers are familiar with. It's been on the cover of TIME Magazine. The "New York Times" refers to it as the valley of death. Off the top of my head, unfortunately, I can't remember how many American soldiers we have lost there, but it's probably 30 or 40.

This is a valley, I don't know, 15, 20 kilometers long. There's only 10,000 people in it. They speak their own language. They speak Korengali. In the year 2009 we have a valley with people who speak their own language. Their only trade is the timber trade. And when they move their timber, they don't even leave their valley. Most of the time, I believe, they just take it to the Mazar Valley, and a middleman picks it up and brings it to Pakistan for them.

We show up. We enter their valley. We occupy the richest man's timber mill. And then we bring in Afghan army and Afghan police, who aren't from there.

And then what do we do? Then we have the Afghan police and Afghan army. They say to the Korengalis, they say, "These mountains here that your families have been cutting trees down, sustaining yourselves for hundreds of years, you don't own them. The central government does. And you have to pay tax on that."

I'm not sure how many people anywhere else in the world wouldn't take up arms against something like that.

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Lindsey Graham uses the news that eight American troops were just killed by the Taliban in a remote outpost to try and make it seem like President Obama doesn't support the troops if he doesn't bow down to Gen. McChrystal's request for more troops to be sent to Afghanistan on FOX News Sunday.

GRAHAM: Well, the one thing I can tell you for sure, without reinforcing our troops, you’re going to hear more of what happened today. General McChrystal said without reinforcements we cannot change the momentum that the Taliban has achieved, and the insurgency cannot be defeated in a year if something doesn’t change.

We had this very dilemma in Iraq. We didn’t have enough troops. Everybody thought Maliki was a sectarian prime minister. The country wasn’t governing itself. The security environment became terrible.

The one thing I can tell you, if we don’t add more troops, you’re going to see more of what happened yesterday. The security situation’s going to get worse. And any hope of better governance is lost, and the Taliban will re-emerge.

If you send troops in, we’ll have a second chance at governance. You need to put Karzai’s feet to the fire, or the next government’s feet to the fire, to do a better job. But it’s impossible to bring about better governance without security.

American troops have been getting killed in Afghanistan for a long time and Graham never made that claim before. Are their lives any less meaningful before McChrystal's request? And the troops were stationed in a position that would not be occupied by McChrystal's plan so Goober Graham is wrong on that front too if I understand the strategy correctly.

Eight U.S. troops died in tribal militia attacks on two remote American outposts in eastern Afghanistan Saturday, military officials said.

The attacks, which also killed two Afghan security officers, were the deadliest in months for American troops, The New York Times reported Sunday.

The coordinated attacks by tribal militia occurred in the Nuristan province, along the Pakistan border, NATO's International Security Assistance Force said in a statement.

The tribal fighters mounted the attacks from a mosque and a village in the Kamdish district in the eastern part of the province, and American forces "effectively repelled the attack and inflicted heavy enemy casualties," the U.S .military said.

U.S. Army Gen. Stanley McChrystal has outlined a new strategy to close down many of the remote outposts like those that came under attack.

And you'll never hear a FOX host or a republican talk about Iraq with any real honesty. A major reason why the violence went down in Iraq was because we paid off a whole lot of Sunni leaders with big bucks so they would stop the violence.

Now we put up a 100,000 Sunni militia on the American payroll, people who used to be shooting at the United States who are now on our payroll.

A google search helps me find this from a blog called Political Impressions:

In an April 2008 report, The Christian Science Monitor stated,

He (Abu Abdullah of the Islamic Army of Iraq) also maintains that while the US has succeeded in driving a wedge between AQI (Al Qaeda in Iraq) and Sunnis in Anbar Province, many of the tribesmen there who are now on the American payroll are still aiding IAI and other insurgent groups.

Members of these US-backed militias now number almost 91,000 and are paid a total of $16 million a month in salaries by the US. They are often lauded by President Bush in his speeches on Iraq.

Who do we pay in Afghanistan? Can the Taliban be bribed in different regions? I don't think so. The two countries are completely different in every way and so the comparisons of a surge between the two are absurd.
Don't forget abput Blue America's Afghanistn action called "No Means No!"

Why do I feel like I've seen this movie before? I'm hoping against hope for a different ending this time: America having the strength to walk away from something that will drain our resources with no clear goals in sight.

The top U.S. and NATO commander in Afghanistan warns in an urgent, confidential assessment of the war that he needs more forces within the next year and bluntly states that without them, the eight-year conflict "will likely result in failure," according to a copy of the 66-page document obtained by The Washington Post.

Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal says emphatically: "Failure to gain the initiative and reverse insurgent momentum in the near-term (next 12 months) -- while Afghan security capacity matures -- risks an outcome where defeating the insurgency is no longer possible."

His assessment was sent to Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates on Aug. 30 and is now being reviewed by President Obama and his national security team.

McChrystal concludes the document's five-page Commander's Summary on a note of muted optimism: "While the situation is serious, success is still achievable."

But he repeatedly warns that without more forces and the rapid implementation of a genuine counterinsurgency strategy, defeat is likely. McChrystal describes an Afghan government riddled with corruption and an international force undermined by tactics that alienate civilians.

But Obama is trying to figure out whether that's actually the road he wants to take:

Instead of debating whether to give McChrystal, the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, more troops, the discussion in the White House is now focused on whether, after eight years of war, the United States should vastly expand counterinsurgency efforts along the lines he has proposed -- which involve an intensive program to improve security and governance in key population centers -- or whether it should begin shifting its approach away from such initiatives and simply target leaders of terrorist groups who try to return to Afghanistan.

McChrystal's assessment, in the view of two senior administration officials, is just "one input" in the White House's decision-making process. The president, another senior administration official said, "has embarked on a very, very serious review of all options." The officials spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal White House deliberations.

Obama, appearing on several Sunday-morning television news shows, left little doubt that key assumptions in the earlier White House strategy are now on the table. "The first question is: Are we doing the right thing?" the president said on CNN. "Are we pursuing the right strategy?"

"Until I'm satisfied that we've got the right strategy, I'm not going to be sending some young man or woman over there -- beyond what we already have," Obama said on NBC's "Meet the Press." If an expanded counterinsurgency strategy in Afghanistan contributes to the goal of defeating al-Qaeda, "then we'll move forward," he said. "But, if it doesn't, then I'm not interested in just being in Afghanistan for the sake of being in Afghanistan or saving face or . . . sending a message that America is here for the duration."

"We were walking, I was holding my grandson's hand, then there was a loud noise and everything went white. When I opened my eyes, everybody was screaming. I was lying metres from where I had been, I was still holding my grandson's hand but the rest of him was gone. I looked around and saw pieces of bodies everywhere. I couldn't make out which part was which."

That's the testimony of one man caught up in the disastrous airstrike on a Afghan bridal party wrongfully identified as a Taliban force back in July. The carnage was so complete they had to bury the 47 victims in 28 graves. US and NATO troops have denied the attack, but say they are investigating. In another similiar attack back in August they denied involvement at first too. Then investigated and found themselves blameless, only to finally admit their culpability and apologise once independent footage of the destruction surfaced. In a third such incident, in November, footage surfaced before the kabuki dance could begin. So far this year, such mistakes have cost over 600 Afghans their lives.

The Guardian report from which the above quotation was taken also includes a video report which contains footage of Afghans mutilated and crippled by mistaken Western airstrikes.

Afghans understand what's going on here in a way that Western leaders don't seem to.

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