Watch Your Back, Captain Hoh

The first U.S. official to resign in protest over the Afghan war is Marine Captain Matthew Hoh, who was working in a civilian job in Afghanistan:

"I have lost understanding of and confidence in the strategic purposes of
the United States' presence in Afghanistan," he wrote Sept. 10 in a four-page
letter to the department's head of personnel. "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."

The reaction to Hoh's letter was immediate. Senior U.S. officials,
concerned that they would lose an outstanding officer and perhaps gain a
prominent critic, appealed to him to stay.
U.S. Ambassador Karl W.
Eikenberry brought him to Kabul and offered him a job on his senior embassy
staff. Hoh declined. From there, he was flown home for a face-to-face meeting
with Richard C. Holbrooke, the administration's special representative for
Afghanistan and Pakistan.

"I'm not some peacenik, pot-smoking hippie who wants everyone to be in
love," Hoh said. Although he said his time in Zabul was the "second-best job
I've ever had," his dominant experience is from the Marines, where many of his
closest friends still serve.

But many Afghans, he wrote in his resignation letter, are fighting the
United States largely because its troops are there -- a growing military
presence in villages and valleys where outsiders, including other Afghans, are
not welcome and where the corrupt, U.S.-backed national government is rejected.
While the Taliban is a malign presence, and Pakistan-based al-Qaeda needs to be
confronted, he said, the United States is asking its troops to die in
Afghanistan for what is essentially a far-off civil war.