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?

After months of party wrangling that culminated in a Sunday night political spectacle, President Obama has finally managed to push through far-reaching reform to the country’s health care system. The House voted 219-212 for final approval of the legislation, and on Tuesday the President will sign the bill into law.

The new law would require most Americans to have health insurance, would add 16 million people to the Medicaid rolls and would subsidize private coverage for low- and middle-income people, at a cost to the government of $938 billion over 10 years, the Congressional Budget Office said [The New York Times].

Here’s a primer on what some of the biggest changes will be in the current health care system. While some changes won’t come into effect till 2014, there are some things that will affect your insurance this year.

Immediate Changes (2010)

These are the changes that Obama and team call the “early deliverables,” because they would kick into effect as early as six months after the bill is signed into law. Here are a few.

• The uninsured can finally get coverage: Adults who have been denied coverage because of preexisting conditions will be able to sign on to a federally subsidized insurance program that is due to be established within 90 days. This stopgap insurance program, whose coverage isn’t expected to be comprehensive, will expire once new insurance exchanges start operating in 2014.
• Coverage for everyone: Insurance companies will not be allowed to drop people from coverage when they get sick, nor can they make health plans vastly more expensive for people with preexisting conditions. Lifetime limits on the amount of health care an insurer will pay for will be eliminated, and annual limits will be restricted.
• Coverage for kids: For parents with a sick child, there’s some relief—companies won’t be able to drop kids under the age of 19 from coverage because of pre-existing conditions. Parents can also keep their kids on a family plan till they turn 26 or get a job that offers them benefits.
• Closing the doughnut hole: An estimated 4 million Medicare beneficiaries who hit the so called “doughnut hole” in the program’s drug plan (the gap in coverage which currently begins after $2,700 is spent on drugs) will get a $250 rebate this year. The cost of drugs in the coverage gap will then drop 50 percent next year, and the hole will be closed entirely by 2020.
• Tax credits for small businesses: For small businesses with fewer than 25 employees and average wages of less than $50,000, the government will provide a tax credit of up to 35 percent of the cost of healthcare premiums so that they may provide coverage to their employees.

Read the rest of my post for Discover Magazine here.

Citigroup CEO adjusts to the "new normal", says economy is on road to recovery (Photo: Smriti Rao)

Ben Bernanke says the recession is over, the DOW swaggers to the top of 10,000 and Obama assures us the worst is behind us. Job numbers released this Friday by the Bureau of Labor Statistics back them up showing a net job loss for November of just 11,000.

The nation’s unemployment rate also dipped slightly from 10.2 percent last to 10.0 percent this November. Signs that Citigroup CEO Vikram Pandit says point to an economic recovery.

“It’s interesting to see the number of job losses is narrowing steadily,” said Pandit. “There’s expanding economic activity, corporate activity, and housing declines are lower. All these trajectories are going in the right direction,” he said.

Speaking at a media roundtable at Citi’s Headquarters at Two Court Square in Long Island City, Pandit expanded on the bank’s efforts to aid the recovery and to minimize the foreclosure crisis in one of New York’s worst hit areas- Queens.

New York’s housing market suffered a particularly severe fallout in the wake of the housing crisis in the U.S., with over 50,000 new foreclosure filings in 2008 alone, a 30 percent increase over the preceding year.

In Queens, more than 5000 properties received foreclosure notices according to the Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy – the leading academic research center in New York City devoted to the public policy aspects of land use, real estate development and housing.

St.Albans and South Jamaica were the worst hit – with more than 540 homes from these two areas going under the hammer in 2008. But Pandit says despite the dismal numbers, things could have been worse.

“In New York City we should consider ourselves fortunate,” he said. “There are issues here too- but compared to the rest of the country- we are in a much better position,” he said, referring to Citi’s foreclosure prevention program that includes modifications, extensions, forbearances and reinstatements. A program Pandit credits with helping people retain their homes.

“In NYC, our numbers are good,” said Pandit. “Out of every 77 people with mortgage problems, 76 have managed to retain their homes,” he said.

He urged Citi customers to leverage this program by going to their local branches and asking for help with their mortgage modification. “A lot of times people are reticent to ask for help,” he said, “but we urge you to call in our helplines or go to the branch.”

For home-owners with language barriers, Pandit urges them to seek help via local community-based organizations who can then direct them to this program.

Loan modification however is just one aspect in Citigroup’s restructuring as it adapts to the “new normal”, Pandit said.

With $1.9 trillion in assets, Citigroup is the third-largest U.S. bank.  Pandit, who has shrunk Citigroup by about 25 percent, said the problem at his institution wasn’t size but strategic clarity.

After spinning off the Travelers insurance business and reducing the amount of risky trading that Citigroup does, Pandit said the bank has narrowed its focus.

“We’re about 25 percent smaller as a company,” he said. “The most fundamental part of our change was to take a company focused on products to a company focused on clients.”

He said Citi hopes to achieve a culture that practices responsible finance that recognizes that “banking is a means to an end and not an end in itself.”

Pandit has a special relationship with Queens. He moved here from India when he was 16. In the swanky, glass fronted Citi Headquarters, the Columbia graduate beamed that the county and the city ought to look at the future with optimism.

While refusing to comment directly if there were any layoffs in store for Citi employees at Long Island City, he reflected that it had been “an interesting year.”

“We have done a lot as a company to put our house in order. We have raised capital, directed operating leverage by cutting costs – we feel like we are in a fundamentally different place.”

While Citigroup is confident that it can keep the company profitable and repay the $25 billion it received from the U.S Treasury’s Troubled Asset Relief Program, it remains to be seen if it’s customers with refinanced mortgages share Pandit’s rosy outlook for the future.

This piece first appeared in The Queens Chronicle

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?

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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.

Fed chairman Ben Bernanke says the recession is “very likely over,” the Dow swaggers to the top of the 10,000 mark, and Obama is confident the worst is behind us.

So why does it still hurt so bad? If you are one of the millions in America looking for a job in this economy, it’s hard to believe the pundits.

“Employment is a lagging indicator,” they assure us, speaking like parents chiding a child for not eating his greens.

But if there ain’t no green in the pocket, it’s hard to swallow what they say. Everywhere, the stories are the same—making us wonder, is the economy really recovering?

“It’s a really bad market,” says Wonyoung Hong, a taxation major at New York’s Fordham University who moved from Korea last year.

“Really impossible to get a job. A lot of my friends were fired at the end of last year; they’re still looking for jobs. They all have good backgrounds, experience, and most went to school here. When I see such qualified people struggling, I feel it will be more difficult for me.”

Hong, 27, graduates next month and going by her description of her summer internship application process, she is ready for “hell.”

Read the rest of the piece at Koream Journal

Retired four-star general Karl Eikenberry, currently serving as U.S Ambassador to Afghanistan, recently sent two private cables to the White House imploring them not to escalate the number of troops on the ground.

Eikenberry warned Obama of President Karzai’s “erratic behavior”, and questioned his ability to root corruption out of his government.

The Ambassador also expressed frustration over the Obama administration’s lack of non-military financial support.

Eikenberry asked the administration to set aside $2.5 billion on non-military development in 2010, but his request has apparently not even been formally addressed yet.

So whenever any of you tout the argument that we should be in Afghanistan, as long as we’re focusing on building up the country, please remember, President Obama does not care about that.

Whether or not we should be spending billions to build a country from scratch is a whole separate debate, but it’s one that the Obama administration probably isn’t even interested in having.

Finally, Eikenberry, who served as commander of U.S forces in Afghanistan from 06-07, and was in charge of the Afghan military training program prior to that, wrote in his cables that sending thousands of new U.S troops would “increase the Afghan government’s dependence on U.S. support at a time when its own security forces should be taking on more responsibility for fighting.”

I hope the media really picks up on this guy, and puts him head to head with McChrystal. They are two different men with two different assignments, but they have equal credibility in this debate.