In a CSIS panel on May 14, Bob Schieffer said he asked former Defense Secretary Robert Gates about the dangers facing the United States. He said, “When I asked [Gates] what he thought was the greatest threat to our national security, he said he thought it was the US government’s inability to come together and find compromise for the various problems that we face today.”

Those are sobering words, coming from the person who was appointed by President Bush to run the military in the middle of two wars, and who continued to do so under President Obama. I feel like it’s a cliché to say I’m sick of the shrill hysterics of Congress and their utter failure to govern over the last few years. I’m hoping that sane voices will eventually begin to counter the tantrum tactics.

http://csis.org/multimedia/video-schieffer-series-discussion-foreign-policy-politics-and-leadership-0

I’ve had the new My Bloody Valentine album on heavy rotation. It has some magnificent and beautiful moments, which expand on the lush distortions of their 1991 album, ‘Loveless.’ Their fluid cascade of warbling sound on tracks like “who sees you” or “wonder 2″ can seem like the received transmission of some kind of perfect and radiant form, its signal refracted and attenuated by the passage from the ideal world to our base one, then distorted again by our own flawed and limited ability to perceive. You can still sense the contour of the form through all the layers of compounded error, but its precise shape–the real thing itself–remains unknowable.

So I guess it’s a lot like life.

When I was writing the ‘Kombinat Null’ scenes in Winter Republic, I imagined the music to sound something like this. At one point Saveliy, the Kombinat’s leader, tries to explain to Thomas: “Reality at its most basic level is so simple and yet so, so complex, each of its elements so discrete, so… fine… that we can’t perceive the deeper elements that drive reality except as a kind of white noise. But white noise implies randomness, and I don’t believe the world can be driven by only randomness. Not completely. The patterns must not be… directed… from outside, but interdependent, directed by an internal process. A process of moiré. It is like this sound we have created here tonight… not white noise, but a series of feedback loops.”

I’m slogging through Pynchon’s ‘Against the Day.’ It’s Pynchon at his best; complicated, meandering, prurient, sometimes intentionally dumb, often laugh-out-loud funny. The book is real labor, and you never know if you’re fully understanding all the nuances of the text. But then, unexpected, you suddenly get walloped across the head by these moments of shocking clarity, moments of incandescence almost too beautiful to bear. Like the moment Kit discovers Lake Baikal while wandering Central Asia…

“He had gazed into pure, small mountain lakes in Colorado, unsoiled by mine tailings or town waste, and was not surprised by the perfect clarity which had more than once taken him to the verge of losing himself, to the dizzying possibility of falling into another order of things. But this was like looking into the heart of the Earth itself as it was before there were eyes of any kind to look at it… In some way he was certain of but had not quite worked through, it was another of those locations like Mount Kailash, or Tengri Khan, parts of a  superterrestrial order included provisionally in this lower, broken one. He felt swept now by a violent certitude. He had after all taken the wrong path, allowed the day’s trivialities to engage him—simply had not worked hard enough to deserve to see this…”

So that’s it then… Now I have to find some way to travel to Lake Baikal. It’s always been on the list, but now I know.

From STRATFOR: http://www.stratfor.com/weekly/consequences-intervening-syria

US policy is to provide non-military assistance to the Syrian rebels. That isn’t stopping Turkey, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States from sending weapons to increasingly radicalized groups. One effect is that the hardline Islamist rebel groups are pushing aside more moderate elements. Also, there is some evidence that Saudi is helping young people to get to Syria for training and integration into the rebel groups. If true, this is an insanely bad idea. The militants who survive the civil war will eventually return – well-armed, radicalized and competent.

I was lucky enough to attend the pre-taping cocktail hour of the Slate Political Gabfest in Seattle earlier this week. One of the questions I wanted to ask John Dickerson was roughly what proportion of the information he knows through living in the political rumor mill and getting interviews on deep background is he actually able to report publicly. In other words, how close does the ‘news’ come to the real events that drive politics and policy.

The answer was, well, sometimes not so much. In foreign policy, governments often need to use a little public misdirection in order to avoid compromising active operations (the hunt for Bin Laden was a good example of this). The same often holds true in domestic policy – the unseen handshakes behind the scenes are often what drives agreements more than what we see publicly.

Of course, this isn’t a startling revelation. But I wanted to hear from one of the top people in the business and who is very well connected in domestic and foreign policy circles how real this cliché actually is. I suppose it’s part of the joy and frustration of being a reporter. You learn so much about the world, but you can only report a fraction of what you’ve learned. And people you’re writing for can sometimes only consume a fraction of the detail it takes to adequately understand the complexity of the world.

The Gabfest was tremendously entertaining as always. I think it’s one of the most listenable and information-dense news programs out there in any format. When I was based in Copenhagen, it was my weekly lifeline to stay in touch with politics in the US.

Just returned from a talk by David Sanger, New York Times Chief Washington Correspondent and author of the new book, “Confront and Conceal: Obama’s Secret Wars and Surprising Use of American Power.

Among Mr. Sanger’s topics was the Obama administration’s strategy in Afghanistan. He said that President Bush started the war with grand talk about rebuilding Afghan society as a product of a new Marshall Plan. After twelve years of grinding war and very thin progress, President Obama’s current goals for Afghanistan have been scaled back to three. First, keep enough troops and resources in theatre to prevent the complete collapse of the central government in Kabul. Second, keep Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal from getting loose. Third, if Pakistan collapses, use our presence in Afghanistan to continue going after Al Qaeda in the region.

I asked him about that second goal. How does the US mission in Afghanistan have any effect on the Pakistani nuclear arsenal, and what leverage does the US government think it actually has over the security and control of that arsenal?

Mr. Sanger said that the plan for the residual US force in Afghanistan includes provision for a core of nuclear weapons specialists that would somehow “deal” with the event of some warheads getting loose from the Pakistani arsenal.

I’m glad to hear the military is doing some serious contingency planning . There was a terrifying article in the Atlantic last December, that disclosed that the Pakistani military has a policy of moving mated nuclear weapons in lightly defended vans over regular roads. From the article:

Western nuclear experts have feared that Pakistan is building small, “tactical” nuclear weapons for quick deployment on the battlefield. In fact, not only is Pakistan building these devices, it is also now moving them over roads.

What this means, in essence, is this: In a country that is home to the harshest variants of Muslim fundamentalism, and to the headquarters of the organizations that espouse these extremist ideologies, including al-Qaeda, the Haqqani network, and Lashkar-e-Taiba (which conducted the devastating terror attacks on Mumbai three years ago that killed nearly 200 civilians), nuclear bombs capable of destroying entire cities are transported in delivery vans on congested and dangerous roads.

I hope those nuclear contingency plans Mr. Sanger mentioned never need to be put to the test.

Just got back from a very eloquent and informative talk by Rajiv Chandrasekaran, Washington Post associate editor and author of the new book Little America, The War Within the War for Afghanistan. The book dives into the history of the US-Afghanistan relationship, starting with a grand scheme by the former Afghan king to develop the farm belt of Helmand province using US engineering firms. That plan was the first of a series of massive engineering and cultural failures that could have served as valuable lessons for the Obama administration when they inherited the current war. Alas, it seems that no one was paying close attention.

I asked Mr. Chandrasekaran, if the US told the Pakistani government that we would cut off all funding and contact unless they forced the ISI to stop aiding the Haqqanis and the other Taliban networks, would that be a credible threat? And if we did cut off all contact to Pakistan, would it make a difference to the war in Afghanistan?

He said that despite sharing a border and many cultural ties, the relationship between Pakistan and Afghanistan has never been all that friendly. He said that when the United Nations voted to recognize the new state of Pakistan in 1948, there was only one country that voted against – Afghanistan. He said the Afghans traditionally fear being overshadowed politically and economically by Pakistan, and that many in the northern part of the country, and even some in the Pashtun south, lean toward India as a counterweight to Pakistan’s power. President Karzai, like many Afghan elites, was educated in India.

On the other hand, Pakistan’s greatest fear is that someday the Indian army is going to roll across the border with thousands of tanks and ‘take back’ Pakistan under Indian control. It’s sort of an odd concept that India would want to do this and actually take over management of such a deeply problematic part of the world. But the countries have fought several wars and the fear persists. Chandrasekaran said that Pakistan finds it unacceptable to allow a fully independent Afghanistan on their western flank, which could potentially become an Indian ally in some future war. So the Pakistani government allows the ISI to continue destabilizing Afghanistan to prevent that from happening.

Bottom line, according to Chandrasekaran, is that an independent, pro-Indian Afghanistan would be perceived as such an existential threat to Pakistan that they would be willing to take the hit on American military aid in order to continue their policy to keep Afghanistan unstable.

I’m reading “Private Empire,” Steve Coll’s excellent book on ExxonMobil. I attended Coll’s lecture here in Seattle in May. He said that researching ExxonMobil was a lot harder than the reporting he did on Al Qaeda and the CIA, because ExxonMobil had tighter security and fewer employees willing to speak to him.

One of the topics of the book is ExxonMobil’s long-standing oil extraction operation in Chad. Coll reports that the government of Chad (such as it is) gets many times more revenue from taxes on ExxonMobil’s oil exports than it does in foreign aid from the United States (or anywhere else). So when the Chadian government has a problem, ExxonMobil’s phone number is quite higher up their speed dial list than the State Department.

Out of curiosity I looked at some satellite photos of N’Djamena, Chad’s capitol city. There is an airport a few clicks northwest of the center of the town, and I was surprised to see a lot of hardware on the airport ramps. A few C-130 transports and smaller C-160s or Fokker 28 transports as well as what looks like a C-135 tanker. Also a couple of old Mi-25 gunships of the Chadian Air Force. Then I saw this – a big Antonov 124 heavy-lift cargo plane, caught in the act of either loading or unloading a helicopter. You can see three more helicopter fuselages wrapped up for transport on the ramp just to the north. From the size, I am guessing they are French Air Force Pumas. I know the French military sent Puma transports as part of the detachment they sent in 2008 to keep Sudanese militias from crossing over into Chad from the war in Darfur.

Are these Pumas being boxed up and sent home? Or are they replacements or reinforcements for the existing French force? If anyone knows please fill me in. I’d also like to know which An-124 operator was contracted for this work and by whom. You can see some letters on the top surfaces of both the Antonov’s wings, but the resolution is not good enough to read them.

My friend Robert Phoenix invited me on his radio show, The Friday Farcast, for a nice long talk about the book, the creative process, San Francisco in the 1990s, and macroeconomics. This is the kind of conversation I wouldn’t mind having more often.