Matt Hoh is a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy. Until his resignation five years ago, he was a board member of Council for a Livable World, one of the larger national security/arms control organizations in the PSFG. Hoh says that while he has no inside information about the funding policies of the funding consortium or its members, "The assumption that the big peace and national security funding groups are taming the peace movement is a correct one."

“'It doesn’t include the thousands who are part of U.S. special operation and NATO special operation teams, CIA teams, as well as the dozens of squadrons of attack aircraft and bombers, whether they be manned or drone, that are in the area,' Matthew Hoh said on Democracy Now! 'The potential for the United States to remain involved militarily is quite high, even if all 3,500 acknowledged U.S. troops are withdrawn, as well as the NATO troops.'"

"We also speak with Matthew Hoh, senior fellow with the Center for International Policy, who in 2009 resigned from the State Department in protest of the escalation of the War in Afghanistan. 'This is a step that is necessary for the peace process to go forward, and that’s what the Afghan people desperately need,' he says. 'It has been well over 40 years of fighting. Millions of Afghans have been killed or wounded. The devastation on the Afghan people is hard to imagine.'”

Just as the coronavirus has exposed systemic rot, this moment also reveals how obsolete common conceptions of U.S. warfare truly are—raising core questions about the holiday devoted to its sacrifices.

when you look at the number killed, you have to look at, say, 9,000, rather than almost than 4,500. That does not take into account the suicides. The suicides from these wars, based upon Veterans Administration data, runs between 9,000 and 10,000 killed by suicide.

Worth the Price? Joe Biden and the Launch of the Iraq War is a documentary short reviewing the role of then-Senator Joe Biden (D-DE) in leading the United States into the most devastating foreign policy blunder of the last twenty years. Produced and directed by Mark Weisbrot and narrated by Danny Glover, the film features archival footage, as well as policy experts who provide insight and testimony with regard to Joe Biden’s role as the Chair of the United States Senate Committee on Foreign Relations in 2002.

Matt Hoh and another veteran explains why Congress has failed to stop the endless wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and say the United States needs to learn from its imperialist history if anything is going to change.

Hundreds of thousands in Iran have been mourning the death of Qasem Soleimani. The Iranian general was killed by a US drone on the orders of President Donald Trump. Washington says Soleimani’s death has saved American lives, but has it actually set two bitter foes on the path to war?

The equivalent of the killing of General Soleimani would be as if the Iranians assassinated General Richard Clarke, the US four star general in charge of all US special operations, but only if General Clarke had the name recognition of Colin Powell and the competency of Dwight Eisenhower. Those Iranians in government and civil society who want restraint, de-escalation and dialogue will find it hard to argue against retaliation.

The Washington Post on Monday published “The Afghanistan Papers: A secret history of the war” based on the U.S. government’s own documents. The main piece is titled “At War with the Truth: U.S. officials constantly said they were making progress. They were not, and they knew it.”

For the first time in decades, passage of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) has been delayed due to disagreements between Democrats and Republicans. The disagreements at the center of the delay in Congress are, as usual, partisan in nature: funding for the President’s border wall with Mexico, a Space Force the Pentagon doesn’t want, the impeachment hearings, and other domestic political issues. This delay in passage of a reconciled NDAA between the two houses of Congress, however offers an opportunity, because buried within the NDAA are possibilities to repeal the pieces of legislation that have brought mass human, financial and moral consequences to the US, have wrecked entire nations and societies abroad, and have made the United States less safe.

The Veterans Administration’s Veterans Crisis Line fields, on average, just under one thousand distress calls a day from veterans thinking about suicide. Add to that about one thousand online chats or text conversations aimed at avoiding suicide every week.

The US military is being hit with a rising tide of suicides, especially among young veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. One veteran of both, analyst Matthew Hoh of the Center for International Policy, says official statistics show -- the risk of suicide rises with exposure to combat, and even more for those who have killed. What this points to, Hoh says, is suicide from what he calls “moral injury,” the sense that your wartime experience led you to betray your personal standards of morality or conduct.

In 2001 and in 2002 Congress passed authorizations for war. While not declarations of war, these mandates, each titled as an Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF), provided the legal framework for attacks against al-Qaeda and then for the Iraq War.

In 2001 and 2002, Congress passed authorizations for war. While not declarations of war, these mandates, each titled as an Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) provided the legal framework for attacks against al-Qaida in 2001 and in 2002 for the Iraq War. Both AUMFs are still in effect. As Congress considers its annual authorization to fund the Pentagon, Sen. Jim Inhofe, as chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, is in a position of responsibility and ability to repeal these AUMFs.

The famous Vietnam Memorial, [Hoh] writes, “is a wall that contains 58,000 names. It would have to lengthened by some 2,000 feet to include the 100,000 to 200,000 plus Vietnam vets who are estimated to have been lost to suicide, while keeping space for those yet to come. VA data reveals that almost two Afghan and Iraq veterans die by suicide each day on average. That adds to an estimated 7,300 veterans who have killed themselves since just 2009, after coming home from Afghanistan and Iraq, a number greater than the 7,012 service members killed in those wars since 2001.”

The reality is that deaths by suicide often kill veterans at a level greater than combat, while the primary reason for these deaths lie in the immoral and ghastly nature of war itself.

The United States and Taliban had appeared close to signing an agreement after holding nine rounds of talks in Doha, but the negotiations took a surprise turn when President Trump suggested a Camp David meeting that included Afghan President Ashraf Ghani, who had not been involved in the previous talks.

Matthew Hoh, an Iraq War veteran and former State Department official, talked about his Counterpunch.com article, “Time for Peace in Afghanistan and an End to the Lies.”...

It has been more than nine years since I resigned in protest over the escalation of the Afghan War from my position as a Political Officer with the US State Department in Afghanistan...