Last week, our commentary began: "Today Barack Obama has critical decisions to take." Nothing changed. If anything, the situation worsened.

This week, the September resignation letter of Matthew P. Hoh, senior civilian pepresentative, Zabul Province, Afghanistan, was published by the Washington Post.

Hoh's three-and-a-half-page letter is a work of first-rate prose - diplomatic, reasoned discourse with emotion unfiltered.

It provides competent analysis of the evidence - reality on the ground - understands the futility of imperial war and the Afghanistan adventure's dire human and economic consequences. War is anything but pretty!

Hoh is neither secretary of state, ambassador nor senator. He is but a young 36-year-old former captain in the US Marine Corps with active combat experience in Iraq.

He served in the Pentagon, suffered post-traumatic stress disorder as he erroneously but inexorably blamed himself for the drowning deaths of two fellow marines as their helicopter went down.

A strong swimmer, he saved himself, abandoned 90 pounds of gear before diving back into the water to rescue his mates in trouble. In this he failed.

The currents had already swallowed them up.

He subsequently chose civilian work which took him first, back to Iraq then to Afghanistan. His experiences there led finally to resignation.

The letter - he was asked to reconsider - speaks of his having "lost understanding of and confidence in the strategic purposes of the United States' presence in Afghanistan."

He continued: "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."

Finding parallels

Any attempt to find parallels to Mr Hoh's letter with living memory leads, ironically and automatically to Chairman of the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Senator John Kerry's April 1971 submission to Congress in opposition to the Vietnam War. Kerry, at the time, enquired rhetorically of Congress: "How could you ask a man to die for a mistake?" Ninety per cent of Americans then knew nothing of colonialism in South East Asia, just as now a great majority know nothing about Afghan society. For Vietnam, Ho Chi Minh always knew the question would come: "When are you going to go home?"

Matthew Hoh assists his own people with this bit of analysis in his third paragraph: "If the history of Afghanistan is one great stage play, the United States is no more than a supporting actor, among several previously, in a tragedy that not only pits tribes, valleys, clans, villages and families against one another, but, from at least the end of King Zahir Shah's reign, has violently and savagely pitted the urban, secular, educated and modern of Afghanistan against the rural, religious, illiterate and traditional. It is this latter group that composes and supports the Pashtun insurgency."

"Our support for this kind of government, coupled with a misunderstanding of the insurgency's true nature, reminds me horribly of our involvement with South Vietnam; an unpopular and corrupt government we backed at the expense of our nation's own internal peace, against an insurgency whose nationalism we arrogantly and ignorantly mistook as a rival to our own Cold War ideology."

After recounting the skill and dedication of US forces, commitment of civilian and military personnel of both NATO and the US, lamenting the cost in lives lost, Hoh makes the point that is either not immediately obvious, or relegated to the background by hawks for the military industrial complex.

With personnel and strategy defined more by the political climate in Washington, DC, than in Afghan "cities, villages, mountains and valleys ... we are mortgaging our Nation's economy on a war, which, even with increased commitment, will remain a draw for years to come."

Senior Civilian Representative Hoh is aware of questions, answers to which even the most visible US cable news commentators and erudite columnists seem to take for granted.

His letter asks "why, and to what end?" What is meant by 'victory' in Afghanistan? What would it be to 'succeed' in Afghanistan? "Success and victory" he says, "whatever they may be, will be realised not in years, after billions more spent, but in decades and generations.

The United States does not enjoy a national treasury for such success and victory."

He couldn't be more spot on, absolutely and unmistakably correct.

Today's wars, although they drive the economy through the military industrial complex, have nothing like the immense technological change and 'stimulus' impacts upon income that US intervention into the second European war had - there's no need now for standardisation of wheel bases, tyre sizes, women leaving the home, joining the workforce in droves to produce ammunition, ship and aircraft parts.

Additionally, the population had been told to go to the mall - savings will be provided by foreigners, China.

Draft creates 'push back'

Vietnam lessons showed the draft creates 'push back', consequences.

Not every upper-class family wants the honour and death-risk of sons at war - even the most hawkish Cheneys and Bushes.

An all-volunteer army avoids these inconveniences while fostering private armies like Blackwater, now called XE.

Flag-draped caskets, gory pictures of death, bombings and massacres drive public opinion against the effort. Embedding journalists and bans against filming such events avoid the public trauma.

America experiences video gaming sanitised war, if ever such could exist.

These new parameters for prosecuting war may buy supportive public opinion but can't avoid economic consequences.

Blood and morality apart, adding to the trillions of dollars the US must find, Wall Street's unashamed, unimpeded extravagances that create no real wealth whatsoever, and its powerful 'fistful-o'-dollars' lobbyists, we begin to imagine the scale of the problem President Obama faces.

Though obvious it yet bears stating: global warming aside, our world economic outlook is not independent of war and Wall Street re-regulation.

wilbe65@yahoo.com