Poor General Stanley McChrystal, America’s commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, it seems, sure learned the hard way. He was booted as America’s top commander in Afghanistan after Rolling Stone magazine published an article stuffed full of colorful quotes from the General.  Bloomberg reports the General offered to resign over those comments and his criticism of US administration officials over their handling of the war in Afghanistan. He will now be replaced by Gen. David Petraeus who has been in charge of Iraq since 2007.

Now, if you have been living under a rock and wondering who the aforementioned Stanley McChrystal is (apart from being a Badass ), Rolling Stone magazine had this helpful description:

McChrystal is a snake-eating rebel, a “Jedi” commander, as Newsweek called him. He didn’t care when his teenage son came home with blue hair and a mohawk. He speaks his mind with a candor rare for a high-ranking official. He asks for opinions, and seems genuinely interested in the response. He gets briefings on his iPod and listens to books on tape. He carries a custom-made set of nunchucks in his convoy engraved with his name and four stars, and his itinerary often bears a fresh quote from Bruce Lee. (“There are no limits. There are only plateaus, and you must not stay there, you must go beyond them.”) He went out on dozens of nighttime raids during his time in Iraq, unprecedented for a top commander, and turned up on missions unannounced, with almost no entourage. “The fucking lads love Stan McChrystal,” says a British officer who serves in Kabul. “You’d be out in Somewhere, Iraq, and someone would take a knee beside you, and a corporal would be like ‘Who the fuck is that?’ And it’s fucking Stan McChrystal.”

He carries a custom-made set of nunchucks in his convoy engraved with his name and four stars, and his itinerary often bears a fresh quote from Bruce Lee. (“There are no limits. There are only plateaus, and you must not stay there, you must go beyond them.”)

Sure, Stan’s the man. But apparently, Stan seemed to have some trouble keeping his gob shut as Rolling Stone reporter Michael Hastings trailed him for his piece. With Hastings around, Stan’s spat out his disdain for Washington’s top officials–not even sparing Ol’ Barry Obama. Here’s what an aide told the mag:

It was a 10-minute photo op,” says an adviser to McChrystal. “Obama clearly didn’t know anything about him, who he was. Here’s the guy who’s going to run his fucking war, but he didn’t seem very engaged. The Boss was pretty disappointed.”

Huffpo had more on the General’s open disdain for Richard Holbrooke, the official responsible for reintegrating the Taliban.

McChrystal reserves special skepticism for Holbrooke, the official in charge of reintegrating the Taliban. “The Boss says he’s like a wounded animal,” says a member of the general’s team. “Holbrooke keeps hearing rumors that he’s going to get fired, so that makes him dangerous. He’s a brilliant guy, but he just comes in, pulls on a lever, whatever he can grasp onto. But this is COIN, and you can’t just have someone yanking on Shit.”

AND…

“Oh not another e-mail from Holbrooke,” [McChrystal] groans. “I don’t even want to open it.” He clicks on the message and reads the salutation out loud, then stuffs the BlackBerry back in his pocket, not bothering to conceal his annoyance.

“Make sure you don’t get any of that on your leg,” an aide jokes, referring to the e-mail.

The General also turns into a sulky child while on an official visit to Paris to talk to French allies and sell the Afghanistan plan to NATO.

“I’d rather have my ass kicked by a roomful of people than go out to this dinner,” McChrystal says

He pauses a beat.

“Unfortunately,” he adds, “no one in this room could do it.”
With that, he’s out the door.

“Who’s he going to dinner with?” I ask one of his aides.

“Some French minister,” the aide tells me. “It’s fucking gay.”.

Sure, Gen. McChrystal, tell us how you REALLY feel. Obama was reportedly quite angry when he read the article. Dismissing the General, he however reitereated that it was just a change of personnel and not policy in Afghanistan. The war still continues.

Oh yes. The war in Afghanistan–anyone remember that?

"I come in Peace." 2009 Nobel Peace Prize Winner President Obama

Oct 6th  marked the 8th anniversary of the war in Afghanistan.

On Oct 8th, 17 people were killed in a car bomb attack outside the Indian Embassy in Kabul.

On Oct 10th,  5 sweet men in Norway decided President Obama must be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, not so much for his “actions”, but for his “intentions.”

Oh, Sweet Sweet Norway!

In two days, President Obama travels to Oslo to pick up his big gold star – just for not being President Bush.

We know that the U.N. doesn’t smell of sulphur anymore, but FYI, the wars are still on in Afghanistan and Iraq,

Pakistan is still being overrun by militants, Iran declared it has a nuclear facilty and China wont re-evaluate the Yen.

So, what exactly was Obama being awarded for?

The Peace Prize has just served as fodder to Obama’s domestic critics who treat him like a snake oil salesman, who rests more on his charisma than achieving anything substantial.

A rhetorically gifted charmer who has just watched as the health care debate spirals out of control, unemployment peaks at almost 10% and according to Steve Kornacki of the Observer, a “first term Middle-East push, that has achieved virtually nothing.” Kornacki also mentions a rather liberal Facebook friend of his who wrote on her Facebook page: “I now have every hope of winning the Nobel Peace Prize. I’m a great speech writer and I’m full of good intentions.”

I think that’s a great indicator of how even liberals are slightly embarassed by the whole deal.

It’s rather odd because it’s the same Nobel Committee that waited for 21 years after President Carter left office to finally proffer him the prize.

Maybe, they should have waited a while for Obama to emerge from the several morasses he is in, to award him the prize. Or maybe this is just Norway’s way of giving the Prez an “A” for effort.

Read more about the Nobel embarassement here, here and here

During her deployment in Baghdad, Sandra Lee was raped twice by a fellow American soldier. Back home, she works to draw attention to the rising cases of sexual assault within the ranks. (Photo Credit: Peter Ash Lee)

On Veterans Day, as President Obama laid a wreath at Arlington National Cemetery, he did so with the full knowledge that for Americans serving across the world, the face of war had changed forever.

No longer are our wars overseas fought solely by men—but also, by an increasing number of women.

The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are the first conflicts in which tens of thousands of American military women have lived, worked and fought for prolonged periods, cultivating a new breed of female combatants.

Yet a startling congressional report by the Department of Defense (released in March) revealed that one in three female combatants experience rape or attempted rape during their military service. The data indicated that there were 2,923 sexual assaults reported in fiscal 2008—a nearly 8 percent spike over the previous year.

In The Lonely Soldier: The Private War of Women Serving in Iraq, author Helen Benedict describes sexual assault against female service members in Iraq. As one soldier explains in the book, “There are only three kinds of females the men let you be in the military: a bitch, a ho or a dyke.”

One 21-year-old soldier Benedict profiled took to carrying a knife with her at all times. “The knife wasn’t for the Iraqis,” said Spc. Mickiela Montoya, who served in Iraq with the National Guard in 2005. “It was for the guys on my own side,” she told the author, who interviewed more than 20 Iraq veterans for her book.

Staff Sergeant Sandra Lee, who served in Iraq from December 2003 to October 2004, knows exactly what Montoya is talking about.

Raped twice by a fellow soldier during her deployment in Baghdad, Lee, 33, has been drawing attention to the rising cases of sexual assault within the ranks.

Working with Veterans for Peace, a nonprofit organization based in St. Louis, Missouri, Lee kicked off their “Military Awareness” campaign in October by making her first public statement about the assaults.

That statement is documented on YouTube. On October 13, during a march in New York City, Lee said, “How could I let this happen to me? I feel stupid, I feel ashamed, I feel shattered,” she continued, recalling her emotions after getting raped. Her voice trembled as she expressed her shame and her failure to report the crime.

After several years of silence, Lee is determined to help other women cope with sexual assault by talking openly about it. “This person,” says Lee, referring to her rapist, “was someone I knew and trusted. It was a friend and a trusted relationship.”

On a recent evening in Manhattan, Lee, a trained opera singer, jokes that she can hold her high notes just as well as she handles her service weapon.

In New York’s glitzy theater district, she could not be farther away from Iraq’s bombs and mortars, but diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder upon her return, the war still rages in her mind.

“There are only three kinds of females the men let you be in the military: a bitch, a ho or a dyke.”

Lee, deployed as part of the Civil Affairs brigade in 2003, was one of the thousands of soldiers in Iraq who despite holding non-combat roles, ended up performing dangerous duties, including looking for improvised explosive devices (commonly referred to as IEDs or roadside bombs) and tasked with rebuilding infrastructure in a war zone.

When Lee first heard about her deployment to Baghdad she recalls her jubilant reaction. “My first reaction was ‘Great!’ Iraq was the place to be!” she says. But when her unit landed in the ravaged city, reality hit home. “There can be no training on what to expect [in a war zone],” she says. “It’s so unpredictable. You can’t train for that.”

Lee was overcome with exhaustion, coping not just with the physical toll of being in Iraq, but also with the mental fatigue of being on guard 24/7.

She recalls an atmosphere where inappropriate remarks and unwanted attention from the male soldiers was the norm. “The harassment is shocking!” exclaims Lee. “It is unreal.”

Then one evening in 2004, a male colleague raped her. It was the first of two such incidents. Lee kept her silence.

Lee’s story echoes the findings of an annual Pentagon report to Congress earlier this year, stating 165 instances of reported sexual assault during a six-month period from the Iraq and Afghanistan military campaigns alone; a 26 percent rise over the previous year.

Despite the assaults, Lee, bogged down by shame and a fear of retribution, did not report the incidents to her superiors. “How will they judge me?” she recalls thinking, explaining her reluctance.

Female soldiers can report rape in the military in two ways. “Restricted reporting” allows a victim to report rape anonymously and seek medical and emotional counseling. But restricted reporting does not trigger an official investigation, leaving victims wary that their attackers will find out about the complaint and come after them, analysts say.

Under “unrestricted reporting,” victims can go directly to the commanding officer of their unit and register their complaint. But most of the commanders are male and as a result, notes retired U.S. Army Reserve Colonel Ann Wright, less than 8 percent of reported rapes result in prosecution.

“Even when the perpetrators are convicted, they seldom go to jail for rape,” adds Wright, who is a member of Veterans for Peace. “The atmosphere in the military is looking the other way and not forcefully prosecuting. In their eyes, the value of a man’s career is higher than a woman’s.”

Due to shame, fear and low prosecution rates, less than 20 percent of assaulted female soldiers report these crimes.
For victims, however, the trauma barely ends there.

In an institution where esprit de corps and camaraderie are the name of the game, the victim and perpetrator continue to serve side-by-side.

Due to shame, fear and low prosecution rates, less than 20 percent of assaulted female soldiers report these crimes. For victims, however, the trauma barely ends there.

In an institution where esprit de corps and camaraderie are the name of the game, the victim and perpetrator continue to serve side-by-side.

“The difficult thing is to turn around and defend this person,” says Lee, referring to her rapist, with whom she continued to serve in Iraq for an entire year. “I felt awkward, uncomfortable.”

When these victims return home from duty, depression sets in. “They have anger, mistrust, and go into periods of isolation,” says Wright. “They start going down a dangerous spiral.”

Which is exactly what happened to Lee. In October 2004, she returned home, harboring her dark secret. She went back to school in Portland to continue pursuing her degree in international relations.

In class, Lee was angry and irritable. Off campus, she felt agitated, constantly sweeping her eyes to the sides of the road while driving, mentally checking for bombs as she’d done in Iraq. She withdrew completely and didn’t share her anxieties with family or friends.

Lee continued to train as a reservist with her unit in Portland, but it wasn’t until 2007 that her symptoms were recognized as post-traumatic stress disorder.

Lee finally admitted to her doctors that she was raped. All the emotions she’d suppressed over the years came flooding back.

Now, Lee bristles with anger over how the military is “sweeping this issue under the rug.” Though she still has not officially reported her rapist, she is urging victims to speak openly—as she has. As Lee confronts her past, she is also currently engaged in a dispute with the military over disability benefits and worries she might be “other than honorably discharged.”

But she says she has no regrets. “I don’t disdain the military,” says Lee. “My job was fulfilling. I went to Iraq. I was part of history!” she exclaims, even as her eyes well up with tears.

So what can the U.S. military do to prevent these alarming rises in sexual assault?

“There needs to be more than a PowerPoint presentation,” Lee says, referring to the mandatory sexual assault awareness training that many soldiers find tedious.

Wright of Veterans for Peace, meanwhile, calls for greater prosecution.

As more women continue to volunteer for the army, Wright cautions them to be cognizant of what they are signing up for. “Women are not warned that they could be raped in the army,” she says. “Women are being treated improperly by the institution, only because they don’t press charges. It is high time the institution started acting responsibly towards this huge sector of the population.”

Social scientist Dr. Laura Miller of the non-partisan, nonprofit think tank, The Rand Corporation, emphasizes that female soldiers need to talk openly about their assault to break the circle of shame.

“The role has expanded in terms of women who are serving in the military,” she says. “Women are now more integrated; they’re in fighter aircrafts, combat ships. But the military is still disproportionately male.

“Being in a war zone is not like being on a base in the U.S., where you have cameras, lights,” Miller adds. “In a deployed environment, you have a lot of people coming and going, you are exposed to each other 24/7, so it provides opportunities for people with those proclivities.”

Today, there are more than 216,000 women serving in Iraq and Afghanistan, making up almost 11.3 percent of the nearly 2 million U.S. active duty and National Guard troops and reservists sent to both war zones.

Many of these mothers, daughters, sisters and wives will eventually return home—some scarred by the violence of war and mutilated bodies. Others, by the trauma of sexual assault.

Some soldiers, like Lee, remain haunted by both.

This piece first appeared in Koream Journal – a magazine on Korean American affairs.

West Point Cadets stand for the national anthem before President Obama's speech announcing an additional 30,000 troops to Afghanistan (Photo by Chris Hondros/Getty Images)

So, it has been signed, sealed, delivered – America will be sending 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan.

Watching President Obama address cadets at West Point as he delivered the news of the troop increase, I couldn’t help but feel a pang of sorrow for all the fresh faced kids (yes, kids) in the audience- faces of the U.S.military – soldiers who will soon be deployed. For many of the young soldiers, the deployment abroad may well be their first trip away from home.

They will land, in dusty airfields in countries, in wars they don’t understand and will eventually never win. They will face hostile locals, bombs on the side of the roads, miss their families, their boyfriends, girlfriends, lovers. They will suffer nightmares, some will lose limbs, arms legs blown off in a a heartbeat. Some will die.

But this evening – they sat in the audience. Watching their Commander-in-Chief issue the battle orders. In the next few weeks, some will deploy to Afghanistan – a war they don’t understand, that won’t be won, but nonetheless must be fought.

Read the full transcript of President Obama’s speech here.

Pundits react to Obama’s speech

Quickly reviewing all major post World War II wars, the New Yorker’s Hendrik Hertzberg asks a series of tough questions he would like the president to answer on Tuesday:

Does it make sense, for example, to spend lives and treasure trying to eradicate “safe havens” in Afghanistan when Al Qaeda has so many other—well, options, from Sudan to Hamburg?

Will a bigger, longer, and presumably bloodier occupation advance or retard the ultimate aim of discouraging Islamist terrorism? Will adding American troops—at a million dollars a year per soldier—encourage Afghans to fight for themselves or prompt them to leave the fighting to us?

Can Afghanistan’s nominal government, with its President elected by fraud and its recent rating as the second most corrupt on earth, be finessed or somehow remade?

The sum we are already spending annually on Afghanistan is greater than its gross domestic product. Are there nonmilitary ways we could deploy that sum which would advance our goals as efficaciously?

Would even forty thousand additional troops suffice for anything resembling the ambitious nation-building program that General Stanley McChrystal, the top military commander in Afghanistan, has proposed? (Counterinsurgency theory suggests that it would take more than ten times that many; would forty—or ten, or twenty—thousand be only a first installment?)

Any counterinsurgency campaign, we’re told, requires a very long commitment. Is the voluntary association of democracies called NATO, organized to deter war more than to wage it, capable of sustaining a twenty or thirty years’ war? For that matter, does the United States—a decentralized populist democracy struggling with economic decline and political gridlock—have that capacity? And what about Pakistan?

………………………………………………..

Speaking of Pakistan, Washington Post columnist Colbert King asks a perfectly reasonable question: But what happens if, in the face of an U.S. escalation in Afghanistan, al-Qaeda moves its terrorist network to Pakistan or beyond? Will U.S. forces follow?

I suppose the short answer is that Blackwater is already there, and U.S intelligence is undoubtedly working with the Pakistani military. The question is whether our soon to be 100,000 troops will be fighting a single Al Qaeda operative six months from now. Some would call that a reason to claim victory and go home. If we get bogged down fighting the Taliban, along with related and completely unrelated insurgents, however, that war could last a lot longer.
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A graphic from the National Post, a Canadian paper, highlights the geographic hotspots where NATO forces have suffered their casualties. The Helmand and Kandahar provinces in southwestern Afghanistan lead the way, with 342 and 210 fatalities respectively. The charts also provide some visually jarring data of the increase in NATO deaths and deaths from IEDs from the relatively tranquil days of 2005 to the present.
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Reuters runs a speculative article quoting administration sources that believe the U.S will begin drawing down troops from Afghanistan beginning in 2013.

Their logic is that by then the U.S will have concluded its training of the Afghan National Army and the Afghan police, such that they can help themselves.

Other officials scoffed at the notion, calling it unrealistic. One truth we can be assured of is vague ‘future withdrawal’ rhetoric from the Obama administration, whether from his lips or in the form of ‘secret leaks’ to the press.

This will be done to damper down opposition to the war. Rank and file Democrats will say, “I don’t approve of this war, but I guess it will be over soon.” We all know how this will go down. And yet we watch…

Gibbs added that the war was “very, very, very expensive”, costing the U.S $6.7 billion in the month of June alone.

Family of suicide victims are seeking letters of condolences from the White House for their fallen children.

While soldiers who commit suicide do receive the same death benefits as those who die in combat, it has been a policy since at least the Clinton administration not to send presidential letters of condolences.

The families explain that the letters would be an important symbolic gesture from the president and the military that mental health problems are real, and need to be seriously addressed to prevent needless deaths.

McClatchy writer Steven Thomma points out that the Rep. Obey’s war surtax is not without precedent. War surtaxes were levied by President Lincoln during the Civil War, President Roosevelt during World War II and President Johnson during the Vietnam War.

The Obey tax would increase federal income tax by 1% on those making less than $150,000 and significantly more on those making over $150,000 a year.

This Thanksgiving, we hope you remembered that 922 soldiers have died fighting in Afghanistan since Operation Enduring Freedom began in 2001.

Operation Enduring Freedom was the second name, after the President Bush’s first choice, Operation Infinite Justice, sounded too much like a throw back to the crusades.

Obama assured the press, “I feel very confident that when the American people hear a clear rationale for what we’re doing there and how we intend to achieve our goals, that they will be supportive.”
I wholeheartedly agree- if Obama can somehow explain these basic premises for the first time, I’ll be sold too.

British PM Gordon Brown has promised that Obama will not being going it alone- pledging that NATO allies will add 5,000 troops, in addition to the 500 new British soldiers. Of course, Brown isn’t sure where these troops will be coming from, though he posits there may be some troops from Slovakia, Georgia and maybe South Korea.

Either way, NATO spokesman James Appathurai cautioned, “Nobody should expect that the day after President Obama makes his announcement that there will be a total troop figure added up … by the other allies.”

Appathurai said a more realistic appraisal would be forthcoming after a January conference of NATO allies.

The Associated Press’s Kathy Gannon paints a bleak picture of life and death in Kandahar. At 800,000 residents, it is Afghanistan’s second largest city, and fighting between NATO forces and the Taliban for the city is fierce, with the local population often caught in the cross fire. There is an expectation that some of Obama’s new troops will be sent there.

The report shows that the U.S currently has 50,600 active military soldiers and 24,000 reservists who are not currently deployed abroad or at home on mandatory rest from their previous deployment.

Should President Obama honor McChrystal’s request to send 40,000 more troops to Afghanistan, particularly for an extended stay, he would either drop the number of available active duty soldiers in the United States to the low thousands, or he would deplete the National Guard to the point that many states would not be ready to handle local emergencies.

The Washington Independent should get tremendous credit for this story. It is obvious to anyone following the war in Afghanistan that our troops are hopelessly stretched, with many serving their third, fourth and fifth tours of duty.

No one in the media is asking where the Obama administration plans to get these troops from, though some speculate that the recession will swell the new recruit numbers.

Additionally, the Obama administration has talked about using the withdrawal from Iraq to provide troops to Afghanistan. However, that withdrawal is going slowly, and many of the soldiers coming back from Iraq will need to rest in the U.S before redeployment.

As much as right-wingers love to clamor about “America’s security”, does it not seem absolutely reckless to leave the United States with such few soldiers on its home soil?

One final solution that came to mind was closing military bases around the world to provide soldiers for Afghanistan. I have not seen this idea posited by the administration, but it would be a nice silver lining to a troop surge.

“President Hamid Karzai, after being re-elected for another five years, has dedicated his five years to fighting corruption,” Interior Minister Hanif Atmar told a news conference.

Working under the country’s Attorney General, there will be a new “Major Crimes Unit” that will tackle corruption and other major crimes among public officials. No matter how much money we pour into Afghanistan, there can be no better investment than bringing back the Major Crimes Unit from The Wire, perhaps the savviest police crew in modern memory. They would undoubtedly be reluctant at first, but as always, they could be persuaded by their stoic leader, Cedric Daniels (pictured center).

Walid Karzai and his warlords have had their way thus far, raking in drug money and spending it on guns to take out their rivals, but this is nothing our crew from Baltimore hasn’t seen before. After all, these Afghans can’t be tougher than the Barksdales and Marlo Stanfield. And the Justice Department, as we all know, will green-light just about any wiretap, even under new management.

You might argue that the Major Crimes Unit from Baltimore will lack effectiveness in Afghanistan, largely because they are fictional. I would counter, however, that a President Karzai-appointed Major Crimes Unit will be largely fictional anyway.

Plus, you know you’ve been dying for Season Six anyway.