Hoh was a junior temp who walked off after a few months and emailed his resignation letter to Karen De Young. He gained such prominence by being described as a “senior foreign service officer,” when he was nothing of the sort. He was the most senior civilian in Zabul, but there are like three civilians there, so being the most senior doesn’t matter. A 2nd Lieutenant is the most senior officer of a platoon (usually), but that doesn’t make him anything other than a peon in the overall structure of the Army.

That being said, what has Hoh said that others, like Bacevich, haven’t said better and more prolifically? For you to pretend that his fame is due to anything other than his erroneously reported resume is a bit misleading. People jumped on him because they thought he was a senior career FSO, not because of anything he said. This would have been a non-story — even to you — had his actual resume (a Marine O3 and failed contractor) been reported accurately.

I think you misunderstand the discourse if you think that even a 2nd lieutenant’s rejection of the war wouldn’t be a story, particularly if his brigade commander and McChrystal tried to get him to stay.

I’m not the one misrepresenting Hoh’s resume. See this post if you doubt me. My entire point is that his fame or infamy is a distraction from the actual issue at hand, which is the merits of his critique. It helps that he was on the ground — frankly, I think that’s why people tend to ignore Bacevich. But he shouldn’t rise or fall based on his resume, and I’m surprised that you’re making the meta-point instead of the central one.

That’s not true at all — soldiers, of equal and sometimes greater rank to Hoh — have refused to deploy to Afghanistan or resigned upon return (think of Cpt. Rhodes, the Orly Taitz sort-of muse), and they became the objects of RIDICULE, not serious introspection, precisely because how they behaved. And telling your superiors that you’re going to the press isn’t quite the same as them begging him to stay out of the goodness of their hearts. There is an established dissent channel within the Department of State, where even contractors can submit serious moral and ethical concerns all the way up to the Secretary of State. Hoh didn’t use that. He ran to the Post.

Also, he wasn’t on the ground. He was on the main PRT base in Qalat. You’ve been to these PRT FOBs, you know what’s they’re like. I’ve been in contact with several former civilian officials from Zabul, and it’s highly unlikely Hoh ever even left his base, to say nothing of developing the intimate picture of Afghanistan’s society and sentiments to make the judgments he’s making.

And if his fame or infamy is a distraction from the merits of his critique… then what is your criteria for discriminating between critiques? On what basis does Hoh’s critique deserve greater consideration than a random blogger? You care because he’s the subject of a 2000 word profile in courage. Otherwise, he’d be a footnote.

Cpt. Rhodes didn’t become the object of ridicule because of anything he said about Afghanistan; he became the object of ridicule because of his apparent birtherism. My sense, in having covered both wars, is that any low ranking officer or enlisted’s perspective becomes strategic when the eye of the press is nearby. I think Gen. Krulak had an observation about that…

I’m not defending the Post’s story or the broader presentation of Hoh. At all. Nor am I passing any judgment on his desire to go to the press, although as a journalist I can hardly blame him for not wanting to bang his head against a channel that he clearly thought was a box-ticking exercise for his superiors. And I obviously wouldn’t know who Hoh is or what he said had it not been for the Post.

But so what? All I’m saying is that the man’s critiques should stand and fall on their own merits. And I include the critiques of “random bloggers” all the time on my blog — because I’m a random blogger! Never did I say or imply that Hoh should be listened to and others excluded. It’s a wide world out there; 1000 schools of thought contend; etc. I was alarmed at seeing an important institution in the debate like AfPak Channel declare over Twitter that it was going to ignore him from now on. Whether that was what APC meant or not — and on reflection, I’m not sure it was — it strikes me as quite an extreme overcorrection of the original error of the Post playing up Hoh.

When you describe Hoh as a “high ranking civilian official,” you feed the hype that he should be listened to because of his resume — which you are still overinflating. He was a contractor. By your definition (and the Post’s) every time I am also a high-ranking civilian official in the Department of Defense who resigned in protest over the conduct and management of his program, so therefore my opinions should warrant extensive consideration, segments on Fareed Zakaria’s show, press conferences, and front page profiles.

Obviously, I am a nobody and my opinion does NOT deserve such treatment. My point is, the same thing applies to Hoh.

By the way: Captain Connie Rhodes did not want Taitz to try and stop her deployment.

Since your initial argument was based on Cpt. Rhodes’ being picked on by us icky liberals who lionize Matthew Hoh, you should at least admit this key fact and not try to move the goalposts when you think we’re not looking.

Talk about moving goalposts: who said anything about “icky liberals” or anything relating to partisan politics? I’m talking about how reporters are hyping a non-story — regardless of partisan slant (or is it worth mentioning the large conservative consensus on ending the war in Afghanistan?).

I’m a little unclear on what Tiedemann and Foust are suggesting here. Hoh is a data point. You can debate how significant a data point, but when the debate is around American military involvement in Afghanistan, then someone who has worked in Afghanistan for the US State Department has a point of view that should be heard. I certainly want to know what he thinks, if he’s willing to tell me.

Is the suggestion here that he should NOT be heard? That we should not be entitled to this data point? That doesn’t sound like an appropriate reaction at all. And if saying “he’s a nobody” is the best justification you can come up with for refusing to consider the data he provides, that indicates to me that you have some kind of agenda for suppressing his information.

If you’d like to take exception to the things he actually SAYS, say, that there are insurgents fighting the US occupation who would not otherwise be fighting, then for heavens sake, let’s hear it. But just calling him a nobody isn’t going to accomplish anything…

mikey

I agree. There are two things here: the value of Hoh qua Hoh, and the value of what he said. His resume and relative position do not necessarily invalidate what he said; but neither should it give him any greater voice. More of note, I think, is the statement itself; and Hoh’s public resignation mostly serves to sensationalize an argument that has been stated elsewhere.

Hoh qua Hoh, ma Hoh K

RT karaka@9 and hemlock@8.

Notice I did not call Koh a “high ranking civilian official.” I called him “the highest-ranking civilian official to resign over Afghanistan.” As far as I know, that’s true.

If it is true, then every deployed employee of Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, BAE, Raytheon, and Blackwater are also “ranking civilian officials,” Spencer. He was a contractor, not an official, even if his duties were official. You of all people should recognize the difference.

As for everyone else: Hoh would have been a single human interest story and that’s it — and his mainstream arguments against the war would have remained lost in the buzz of the mainstream — had Karen DeYoung not blasted “SENIOR STATE DEPARTMENT FOREIGN SERVICE OFFICER RESIGNS OMG” all over the front page of the Washington Post. And you all know it, you just also happen to agree with him (and there are PLENTY of arguments against what he said, but I find that relatively unimportant, *precisely* because he said nothing of interest).

I actually don’t really agree with him at all. But I still think you’re conflating his relative unimportance (until he was raised to prominence in the Post) with what he was saying, and using the fact of his unimportance to say that what he said was unimportant, which I think is not necessarily true. You can disregard his letter as having “nothing of interest,” particularly since, as you say, Bacevich (and Stewart, and Engel) have perhaps more eloquently and with more legitimacy made similar arguments. But I think we can credit him with holding his own views, whether or not they are compelling. Should he have gotten so much face time, renown? Really, who cares. But just because he got foreign policy famous for five minutes doesn’t necessarily discount his argument, or his point of view. It simply makes his motives more questionable.

I think what Spencer was arguing, and what I would be inclined to argue as well, is that what he said did have merit, even if it was only as much merit as any blogger or netpundit might have. It makes sense not to want to engage in his sudden, brief fame, but it does not make corollary sense to disregard his argument as pointless just because he did get sudden, brief fame.