Eight more US troops killed in Afghanistan: US diplomat resigns over Afghan war

Eight US troops are killed in bomb attacks in southern Afghanistan on Tuesday, the alliance said, in one of the deadliest weeks for US troops ahead of a presidential run-off. Several troops were also wounded in "multiple complex (bomb) attacks, just a day after 11 US troops died in separate helicopter crashes.
The mounting violence comes at a time when US President Barack Obama is weighing up his options on whether to send additional troops to Afghanistan to fight a Taliban insurgency. that is at its strongest since 2001. Meanwhile, A diplomat disillusioned with US involvement in Afghanistan has become the first US official known to have resigned in protest over the eight-year war, The Washington Post said Tuesday.
Matthew Hoh, 36, was the senior State Department official in Afghanistan's Zabul province, a hotbed for Taliban militants, until he resigned last month. His background in both civil and military fields may have seemed the perfect fit for President Barack Obama's administration as it steps up its counterinsurgency efforts in the war-torn country.
But in a September 10 letter to the State Department's personnel chief, Hoh wrote: "I have lost understanding of and confidence in the strategic purposes of the United States' presence in Afghanistan. "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," added the former Marine Corps captain, according to comments carried by the Post.
The resignation, the newspaper said, "sent ripples all the way to the White House," and government officials scrambled to convince Hoh to stay, concerned that he could become a prominent critic of the fledgling administration's Afghanistan policy.
Hoh was offered a senior staff-level job at the US embassy in Kabul, which he turned down, and was flown to Washington to meet one-on-one with the US special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, Richard Holbrooke. "We took his letter very seriously, because he was a good officer," Holbrooke said in an interview with the daily. Holbrooke initially convinced Hoh - who had also served in uniform at the Pentagon and as a civilian in Iraq - that by remaining in government, he could more effectively change US policy in Afghanistan.