Matthew Hoh
Matthew Hoh is a former State Department official who resigned in protest from his post in Afghanistan over U.S. strategic policy and goals in the country in September 2009. Prior to his assignment as a political advisor, he served in Iraq initially as the Department of Defense representative with a State Department reconstruction and governance team and later as a Marine Corps company commander. When not deployed, he worked on Afghanistan and Iraq policy and operations issues at the Pentagon and State Department.
Having “lost understanding of and confidence in the strategic purposes of the United States' presence in Afghanistan,” Hoh was the first U.S. official known to resign in protest over the Afghan war. In a letter to the State Department’s head of personnel, which has since been cited as an Essential Document by the Council on Foreign Relations, he expressed his position that the Afghan war had worked to fuel the insurgency.
His letter received a high-level response, with immediate outreach from both U.S. Ambassador Karl W. Eikenberry and Richard C. Holbrooke, the Obama administration's special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan. Hoh eventually declined Holbrooke’s offer to join his team in Washington and continues to voice his belief the United States is asking its troops to die in Afghanistan for what is essentially a far-off civil war.
In addition to his service in Iraq and Afghanistan, Hoh was stationed in Okinawa, Japan with the U.S. Marine Corps from 2000-2002.
Hoh’s writings have appeared in the Wall Street Journal and Washington Post, and he was awarded Ridenhour Prize Recipient for Truth Telling in 2010. Hoh graduated from Tufts University in 1995 with a BA in Comparative Religion.
