Is this the voice our country and its president have been needing to hear? Matthew Hoh, a Foreign Service officer in Afghanistan, has issued a carefully written, four-page letter of resignation, saying he can't in good conscience serve so long as his country wastes lives and money pursuing what he calls "truly a 35-year civil war."

This isn't your average peacenik: Hoh was a decorated Marine in Iraq. But, he says, the American people aren't being told the realities of our military presence there — a presence field commander Gen. Stanley McChrystal wants boosted, by 40,000 troops for starters.

Hoh notes that our pretext for being there is to bring al-Qaida to justice — but that the terrorist organization operates in a dozen countries. His letter, passed to national news media, only confirms what many analysts are trying to tell President Barack Obama as he reconsiders his earlier notion that, somehow, Afghanistan was the right war to be fighting.

The embassy staffer's reference to civil war reinforces the many parallels to Vietnam. In that extended tragedy that took 60,000 American lives, our generals and top advisers to presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy and Johnson failed to realize that, far from keeping communism from our shores, our troops were caught in a war of national liberation. For all practical purposes, it was a civil war between Washington-puppet governments and an anti-colonial guerrilla movement that had been going on for more than a decade before Kennedy made it a test of American machismo. When Kennedy was assassinated, his successor couldn't bear being the president who faced up to a terrible mistake — and Lyndon Johnson's great record in civil rights and economic equality was eclipsed by his overriding notoriety as a warmonger.

Today, our president is trying to pull a trashed nation from the brink of depression — and, on many accounts, succeeding. Like the economic mess, he inherited a vengeance-bent invasion of a land led, not by national leaders as we know them, but by tribal warlords steeped in corruption beyond the ken of even a Chicagoan like Obama.

Discredited Republicans from the regime rousted from power last year are accusing the president of dithering. But as Santa Fean George Stone put it so perfectly in a letter to the editor Monday, a little dithering is not always a bad thing.

Especially where our young people's lives are concerned: October has been the deadliest month of the eight-year war of sorts in Afghanistan. And while no one can doubt the courage of our soldiers, Marines and airmen, those lives are being wasted.

We invaded Afghanistan in the heat of anger over the attacks on our country. We threw out the al-Qaida-protecting government — but the one we installed is no better for the people of that backward country. On throwing out the Taliban, we could have declared victory and gone home. Or we could have dedicated a great number of forces to occupying Afghanistan and to nation-building — a small-chance enterprise. But instead, the president of the time gave us an Iraq adventure from which we still haven't extracted our troops.

An exit strategy still is lacking in Afghanistan. That's what President Obama should be demanding from his military advisers as he prepares to meet with them again. As for a solid policy reason for leaving, he couldn't do better than to read Matthew Hoh's letter.