Media Notice: Afghanistan

Matthew Hoh on Afghan War Lies -- Interviews Available 

MATTHEW HOH, [in D.C. area] matthew_hoh@riseup.net Hoh is a senior fellow with the Center for International Policy. He is scheduled to appear on "Democracy Now" on Monday morning and was interviewed on "The Scott Horton Show" on Friday about U.S. policy in Afghanistan. He is featured in the new documentary An Endless War? Getting Out of Afghanistan.

 Earlier this year he wrote the piece "Time for Peace in Afghanistan and an End to the Lies" for Counterpunchand had an in-depth interview about it with Brian Lamb on C-SPAN. 

In 2009 he resigned his position with the State Department in Afghanistan in protest of the escalation of the Afghan War by the Obama administration. He previously had been in Iraq with a State Department team and with the U.S. Marines. 

He said today: “For more than four decades Afghans have suffered in a civil war that the United States has been integral in and responsible for. Prior to the invasion of the Soviet Union in 1979 the U.S. started supplying revolutionary Islamic forces in Afghanistan to create chaos to force the Soviet Union to invade, 'in order to give the Soviets their own Vietnam' as President Jimmy Carter’s national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski said. After the Soviet Union withdrew in 1989, the United States continued to send money and weapons to various Mujahedin groups for years, helping to create a more fragmented civil war with countless people killed, wounded and made homeless [and] the creation of the Taliban. After 9/11, the U.S. replaced one side of the Afghan ethnic civil war with the other side, and did nothing to establish a lasting peace. Eighteen years later, with the first peace talks in decades now cancelled by a president whose motive in doing so seems to be a temper tantrum because of what he heard on Fox News and read on Twitter, the Afghans continue to suffer and Afghanistan remains the world's most violent war.”

 Hoh is a member of the advisory boards of Expose Facts (a project of accuracy.org), Veterans For Peaceand World Beyond War. 

For more information, contact at the Institute for Public Accuracy: Sam Husseini, (202) 347-0020, (202) 421-6858; David Zupan, (541) 484-9167

September 9, 2019

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