Matthew Hoh: Bodyguard of Lies

    
By Matthew Hoh

As has been said, truth is the first casualty of war...         

I’m in a major documentary premiering today on Paramount+

Bodyguard of Lies, by award-winning producer Alex Gibney and director Dan Krauss, details the lies by four US presidential administrations that sustained the Afghan War for twenty years. The film is based on the Afghan Papers, the 2019 Washington Post expose that detailed how hundreds of American officials had testified to the Afghan Special Inspector General for Reconstruction that the war was unwinnable, known to be unwinnable, but continued anyway.

There is sincerely not one aspect of the war that I can think of that wasn’t dominated by lies and deceit. Even the American casualty counts were disingenuous. More than 2,300 American service members and civilian officials, including my friend Mike Weston, serving there as a DEA officer, were killed from 2001 to 2021 in Afghanistan. However, nearly 4,000 contractors were killed in the war. As a result of the mass privatization of war begun in the 1990s, nearly every one of those contractors was doing a job that in a previous war would have been performed by an American soldier. Using contractors rather than soldiers hides many costs of war, including casualties. Until this film, I have never seen a major media report include those 4,000 contractors in the casualty count. I don’t need to explain why the government would rather say 2,300 killed instead of 6,300.*

For those interested in an explanation of all the different forms of lies of the war, please see my 2019 C-SPAN interview and the accompanying essay, Time for Peace in Afghanistan and an End to the Lies. 

Of course, my dissent from the war began in 2009. For those who want to see how my critique of the war holds up 16 years later, here is my resignation letter.

Here’s another clip from the film, which has a special place in my heart because its thumbnail is of some kid at some God-forsaken combat outpost stirring shit:

I spoke with Judge Napolitano about the film, as well as the ongoing genocide in Gaza and the coming annexation of the West Bank - something we all should be doing everything we can to help the Palestinians resist, violently and non-violently.

Finally, thank you to everyone who reached out during my six-month media absence. I’m well, it’s just my issues from my TBI require me to get rest. I hope such breaks in the future will not be needed.

*To their great credit and my immense respect, the filmmakers painstakingly went through the 3,917 identified contractors as killed in the war to identify roughly 2,000 Americans and included those men and women in the film’s final casualty count.