Robert Wright’s Bloggingheads interview with Matthew Hoh is wonderfully informative about the folly and pointlessness of our Afghan policy.

The thing is 64m48s at regular speed, 46m06s at the slightly speeded-up option Bloggingheads allows. If you give a damn about U.S. policy in Afghanistan, it’s a must-watch.

Hoh resigned from his Foreign Service job last September over our Afghan policy. After listening to him for an hour, I’d say this is exactly the kind of person we should want in the U.S. government — smart, courageous, patriotic, honest. In sad practice this is of course just the kind of person career politicians and bureaucrats detest. There were champagne corks a-popping in State, CENTCOM HQ, and the White House when Hoh resigned, you can be sure.

The most moving part of the clip is Hoh talking about his military career:

[4m50s] The best job I ever had was company commander in the Marines . . . the privilege of leading 152 marines and sailors . . . an experience unparalleled, and it is something I will never have again.

Notice how he remembers the precise number of men under his command. That’s the kind of little detail that gives you a glimpse of a man’s innermost heart. Notice the elegiac note, too. (Asked by an interviewer in old age if there was anything he regretted about his life, the late great Enoch Powell replied yes, he regretted not having died fighting in WW2. I suspect this is a mood that comes over every ex-soldier occasionally.)

Hoh’s war service in Iraq opened his eyes to the lies, stupidity, and careerism that lay beneath the high rhetoric of nation-building.

[11m25s] Our government’s lack of intellectual honesty . . . lack of ability to take the blinders off and recognize what the reality of the situation on the ground is . . .

“How does this delusional psychology come to infest an entire bureaucracy?” Robert Wright asks Hoh at 13m45s. We get some cogent answers.

What drove Hoh to resign at last was the utter disconnect between our stated objectives and what he saw actually happening:

[1m06s] What are we doing [there]? What benefit is this to the U.S.? . . . The costs of this do not add up to the benefits we’re receiving. . . . [24m10s] What we were doing there certainly wasn’t making the U.S. safer, it certainly wasn’t benefiting the U.S.

Along with that goes the distress of a conscientious military officer at the loss of young men’s lives in a futile enterprise hopelessly corrupted by the shallow vanity of politicians swept aloft by their own rhetoric:

[37m17s] We brought in [to govern Marja] a man who had lived in Germany for 15 years, who had served four years in jail in Germany for attempted murder. . . . There’s going to be a monument to this war eventually. . . . It’ll probably take for ever, like everything else does in this country, but eventually there’ll be a monument to this war and it’ll probably, like the Vietnam memorial, list the names of our fallen, and there’s going to be names on there who died this last month or two to put a carpetbagger, who had served time in prison, in charge of Marja. . . . It’s crazy.

Yes it is. But what about the terrorist connection? Didn’t our president tell us his goal is “to disrupt, dismantle, and defeat al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan”? (Yes he did.)

[44m15s] Al-Qaeda . . . has evolved. . . . We should capture them and it’s a shame we haven’t done so over the last decade . . . [but now] they’re really just providing inspiration. . . . The operations are carried out by individuals or small cells [whose] connection to al-Qaeda is a virtual one. . . . Our operations in Afghanistan are having no effect on al-Qaeda.

There’s a tragic element here too. Matthew Hoh confesses up front that his goal had been Derbian, i.e. to GET A GOVERNMENT JOB:

[9m24s] I wanted to be a career civil servant for the U.S. government. . . . [19m24s] My goal was to be a career civil servant in the government.

Yet it is obvious from the interview that Matthew Hoh suffers from a grave character flaw that will prevent him from ever being successful or happy in politics or government work, under any party: He is an honest man.