9/26/25 Matthew Hoh on the Institutionalized War State and the Disgraceful David Petraeus

·1 hr 1 min·4 clips

Obama demanded proof counterinsurgency worked; Hoh says insurgent violence was measurably higher months after targeted-kill raids.

1. The Scott Horton Show interviews Matthew Hoh about the institutionalized failures of the US war in Afghanistan and General David Petraeus's record. 2. Scott Horton hosts; Matthew Hoh, a former Marine Corps officer and State Department official who resigned in 2009 over the Afghan surge, is discussed alongside Daniel 'Danny' Davis, a fellow Afghan War whistleblower who later exposed Petraeus's claims as false. 3. The core thesis is that the 2009 Afghan surge and its torture-heavy counterinsurgency doctrine were a knowing repeat of a misunderstood version of the Iraq surge. 4. Hoh recounts resigning in August 2009 after telling Obama the escalation 'won't work', backed at the time by the theater ambassador. 5. Horton and Hoh compare Iraq, where the US helped the Shiite majority push Sunni fighters out of Baghdad during the 2007-2008 surge, to Afghanistan, where Pashtuns were the excluded 40 percent plurality rather than a minority. 6. Hoh notes that in Zabul province, only two of seven Afghan battalion commanders spoke Pashto despite the province being nearly 100 percent Pashtun. 7. They discuss how the Afghan National Army was built from the non-Pashtun Northern Alliance and remained roughly 95 percent non-Pashtun throughout the war. 8. Hoh describes the 'El Salvador option', implemented in Iraq under Ambassador John Negroponte with an operative named Steele, and how a related torture apparatus migrated to Afghanistan. 9. He states McChrystal ran Camp Nama, and that roughly 65-70 percent of Afghan detainees later reported being tortured as part of official counterterror policy. 10. Hoh describes nightly raids of 20-25 commando operations by coalition and Afghan forces, with detainees who returned from custody sometimes unable to speak afterward. 11. He recalls being told that after a task force killed the top 25-30 insurgent targets in his province, insurgent activity was measurably higher three months later. 12. He cites Obama, per Bob Woodward's 'Obama's Wars', demanding his generals 'show me where it's worked' on counterinsurgency and getting no answer. 13. Hoh references Robert Pape's University of Chicago research showing that raids and occupation generate more suicide terrorism rather than suppressing it. 14. Horton and Hoh use the film 'Red Dawn' as a recurring analogy, joking that Afghan villagers were expected to embrace US Marines the way no American would embrace an occupier who tortured citizens by night and built schools by day. 15. Hoh references British advisor Sherrod Cooper-Coles, who called the American military 'the biggest hurdle to peace in Afghanistan' upon resigning around 2011-2012. 16. Both recommend Neil Sheehan's 'A Bright Shining Lie' and David Halberstam's 'The Best and the Brightest' as essential reading, alongside Horton's own books 'Fool's Errand' and 'Enough Already'. 17. The tone is a long-form, unhurried two-person conversation between ideologically aligned figures, heavy on historical detail and blunt editorializing. 18. Horton periodically breaks for sponsor reads, including the Expat Money Summit and Roberts & Roberts Brokerage. 19. Best suited to listeners already engaged with anti-war and foreign-policy critique seeking granular Afghan and Iraq war history. 20. Not for listeners wanting a defense of counterinsurgency doctrine or brief, surface-level war coverage.

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