Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001 By Steve Coll
It's easy to be an armchair analyst and tsk, tsk at all the missteps leading up to this or that disaster. After all, everyone doing so has the benefit of hindsight. We can see with perfect clarity what might have prevented 9/11. The problem is that not only do the principals involved in policymaking not have perfect foresight, but neither they nor we can know all the bad things that might have happened, but didn't, because a certain course of action (what in hindsight we see as the wrong course) was taken. Once a giant disaster happens, everyone who warned against it is elevated to the level of seers. But if a different giant disaster had happened, a different set of people would receive our hosannas. Was it wrong for the U.S. foreign policy focus to be more on restraining nuclear ambitions than on quashing small terrorist groups before they metastasized? I can't say.
There are several examples of instances where the Clinton administration could have executed a cruise missile strike on some location where Bin Laden might have been. But the intelligence never came with a high degree of certainty; there was usually only one source, the source was not 100% trustworthy, it was more likely to be 40% certain than 90% certain, and the Clinton people argued fairly credibly that strikes which failed to kill Bin Laden, but possibly killed lots of civilians, would damage U.S. credibility and have the anti-American parts of the world snickering and cheering.
And while it's easy to cringe at the details of the covert U.S. support given to the Afghan mujahedin during the Afghan-Soviet war, such as the fact that all of the money and weapons were channeled through Pakistan and its anti-American, corrupt secret military intelligence police, sowing the seeds for al-Qaeda and the Taliban, it's also true that the U.S. abandoning a presence or a policy in Afghanistan as soon as the Soviets pulled out sowed terrorist seeds. The U.S. can't win either way.
It wouldn't be quite accurate to call this a book about how the entire U.S. government failed to prevent 9/11 and the rise of al-Qaeda. The focus is fairly tightly on the CIA, with State Department diplomats and Pentagon officials entering the narrative only as they interact directly with CIA principals or operatives. English This is an excellent book about modern Afghanistan. The author does a good job at highlighting the information, noting key players, and the various multidimensional problems that have existed in Afghanistan. Coll delivered a lot of information to include the Soviet invasion, the Northern Alliance, the violent power struggles that followed the exit of the Soviet Union, the CIA, the rise of the Taliban, and eventually the role of Osama bin Laden. This was full of knowledge. Sometimes it was slow and dry but I still finished it in a few days. I would highly recommend this as one of the top reports about modern Afghanistan and involvement from the West. Thanks! English
Stephen Coll’s Ghost Wars is a stellar portrait of the events leading up to 9/11. It is a massive and intense read that, by the end, you will have an understanding of how Usama bin Laden was able to successfully attack the U.S. Here are my lightweight comments.
- I have been completely re-educated about the U.S.’s knowledge and involvement of terrorists and bin Laden prior to 9/11. The intrigue and back channel work was complicated and intense for decades.
- After the Iran-Contra affair, the CIA turned to the Justice department to interpret legal actions they could take. This induced lengthy, excruciating debates from the President on down as to how bin Laden could be snatched or killed.
- Early on, Mavis Leno (Jay’s wife) and the Feminist Majority Foundation (of which she is chair) recognized the Taliban’s human rights violations, particularly against women.
- Simply put, no one at the top level of U.S. government (President, CIA, National Security, FBI, Pentagon, Counterterrrorist Center) could or would act to eliminate the terrorist threat on American soil. The debating, discussions, planning, memos, legal briefs, bickering, second guessing, and meetings were unproductive and stifling. No one could produce a perfect scenario for an UBL kill.
- When you get in bed with a rat, they will chew off your ear. As much as we paid Pakistan to be our friend, they were not.
This is not an easy read but it is an excellent view inside international politics.
English A woman got on the train and saw me reading an old-school library hardcover edition of this book. She asked me what I thought of it. Unused as I am (sadly) to sudden unsolicited displays of friendly distaff behavior, I stammered, oh, uh, ur, bluh, well, it's very good, it reads like a novel, it won a lot of awards and “I am catching up on stuff I should have been paying attention to all along.”
“We all should have,” the lady replied.
You said it, honey. While we were snug in the roaring '90's and bow-tied pundits were telling us that school uniforms were a matter of life and death, the unhappy few with shards and shreds of advance information about the upcoming attacks by a monster of our own creation were stuck like mid-level-bureaucratic bugs in amber. If watching a disaster head your way in painful slow motion gives you a headache, keep a pile of hot compresses and an economy-sized bottle of aspirin nearby while reading.
Author Steve Coll has all the details, and I have a great deal of respect for his thorough gathering of fact and his painstaking explanations. But I'm also going to do some sorehead carping about the way he gives space to an unseemly team higher-level government self-servers who, retrospectively, want us to be aware that they were actually a voice of reason in the wilderness. I am skeptical of the claimers, but I'm inclined to cut the author some slack. It was probably impossible, writing immediately after the 9/11 attacks, to get access to documents that would support or torpedo the retrospective claims to foresight of executive-branch mandarins like Karl Inderfurth and Richard Clarke.
However, when Coll says (p. 299) that Colorado Senator Hank Brown tried to change State Department policy toward the Taliban in the mid-90's but was defeated by a “wall of silence”, I have to get up on my hind legs. First, unlike executive-branch mandarins, a Senator should lead enough of his life in public so that any concern of this type should have left a public trail of paper and/or witnesses, which the author could then include in the book's footnotes. If such documents or witnesses exist, they are not cited here. Second, Coll is enough of a Washington insider to know that any Senator can set a member of his staff to make the State Department's life a living hell if he so wishes. The Senator would still have plenty of time and energy left to fundraise until the world looks level. In this case, Coll should have shown some good Washington journalistic sense, meaning, he should assume that every word a member of Congress says is a lie, including “and” and “but”, unless there's convincing evidence to the contrary. Again, there actually may BE convincing evidence to the contrary in this case, but it's not presented. In the footnotes to this part of the book, Coll quotes Brown in a post-9/11 interview saying that the whole matter gave him (Brown) “a lump in my throat” (p. 613). Reading this gave ME a lump in the throat as well, but it's the type I get when I'm throttling the impulse to yell at the book loud enough so that the author will hear my voice through the copy that's sitting on his bookshelf at home.
While I'm on a roll of sorehead carping, let me also join in the small chorus of detractors here on Goodreads and elsewhere who have noticed a certain patience-trying wordiness, in which, for example, someone “perished in a fusillade of gunfire” (p. 47). Occasionally, this tendency can be distracting, as when (p. 46) an Afghan leader is described as “a former failed graduate student at Columbia University”. If he was a former failed graduate student, does this mean that he tried being a failed graduate student and gave it up to complete graduate school successfully? (To be clear, the answer is “no”. His dissertation was rejected.) In the same sentence, the same man is called a “leading architect of Afghanistan's 1978 Communist revolution”. Were there so many architects that some had to be “leading”?
There are many other examples like this.
But I really liked this book. I swear. I read negative reviews of this book here on Goodreads and elsewhere and I thought, “Wow, how discouraging it must be to labor for years to pin down a recent but still-ambiguous and -controversial historical period and have your labors greeted by a chorus of buttheads saying, variously, that you were unqualified to write about this period because you were a left-wing American-hater, or perhaps a tool of the left-wing Washington establishment, or simply because you were a white American.” (OK, so I didn't think it just like that, but you get the idea.) It was especially ironic to read criticisms of Coll's prose style by writers who themselves seemed to labor mightily to write as clichéd and unintelligible prose as possible, often including unexplained references to people and events barely touched on in this book, presumably so we all would be awed and intimidated by the volume of the critic's knowledge.
“You can judge a man by the quality of his detractors.” This thought occurred to me in embryo also while riding a train. (This was a different train, with lamentable lack of friendly women on it.) I had to say various approximations of above out loud before arriving at what I believe is the most elegant variation. This discomfited those around me. It was too late to pretend that I was talking on a cell phone. Unwilling to further alarm my fellow travellers, I ruminated silently: “That sounds much too profound to have been unthought-of until this moment.”
This nugget of wisdom apparently was thought of previously, but Google cannot reveal by whom. “You can judge a man by the quality of his enemies” is attributed to Doctor Who, but I just can't believe that a science-fiction character was the first one in history to voice this opinion. English What an Unlucky Country ...
English
The news-breaking book that has sent shockwaves through the Bush White House, Ghost Wars is the most accurate and revealing account yet of the CIA's secret involvement in al-Qaeda's evolution. It won the Pulitzer Prize in 2005.
Prize-winning journalist Steve Coll has spent years reporting from the Middle East, accessed previously classified government files and interviewed senior US officials and foreign spymasters. Here he gives the full inside story of the CIA's covert funding of an Islamic jihad against Soviet forces in Afghanistan, explores how this sowed the seeds of Bin Laden's rise, traces how he built his global network and brings to life the dramatic battles within the US government over national security. Above all, he lays bare American intelligence's continual failure to grasp the rising threat of terrorism in the years leading to 9/11 - and its devastating consequences. Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001
There is absolutely no surprise that Steve Coll won the Pulitzer for this extraordinary book about the CIA and Afghanistan up to 9/10/11. This a plethora of well-researched data here about the mistakes and miscues that characterized the US strategy towards first the Russian invasion of this sad, destroyed country and later how the US dealt with the groups left after the Russians left for good.
The hunt for Bin Laden takes up a good part of the latter third of the book and makes for exciting if somewhat depressing writing. You would think that after the disasters in Vietnam and the various messes in Central and South America we were involved in, we would have learned something about supporting local corrupt cronies and turning a blind eye to particularly untrustworthy allies, but unfortunately, this was absolutely not the case. Pakistan and Saudi Arabia are largely responsible for the rise of radical Islam including of course the Taliban and Al Qaeda in the vacuum that consumed Afghanistan following the Russian pullout. It is particularly striking when one thinks of the rich and varied history of this part of the world that has endured non-stop conflict for nearly 40 years now leaving its cities in rubble and its people in eternal crisis. I am impatient to start the sequel Directorate S which I will, of course, review here as soon as I finish.
In the meantime, I picked up A Line in the Sand by James Barr to better understand how the Middle East was drawn following the fall of the Ottoman Empire after WWI which could reasonably be argued as the initial spark for the burning fire that is the whole region now from the Mediterranean to the Himalayas. English Oh, okay, you want us to capture him. Right. You crazy white guys.”
1979 is certainly a dividing line in my life. It was the year that Iranians stormed the embassy in Iran and took Americans hostage. This was quickly followed by the Soviet invasion in Afghanistan. I can remember thinking to myself, Why do the Iranians hate us so much and why would anyone want Afghanistan? Like most Americans, before I could actually formulate an opinion about Afghanistan, I first had to go find it on a map.
If the hostage crisis didn’t sink Jimmy Carter’s presidency, certainly the utter failure of the rescue attempt hammered in the final nail. As a nation we were not used to feeling helpless in the face of a threat. We have always been a nation who firmly believes in never leaving a man/woman behind. It was disconcerting, maddening, to see Americans held hostage, and also to come to the realization that our government was helpless. The days became months and then years. 444 days. Americans would not have any significance as hostages if we didn’t value our own citizens.
As a nation, we were all held hostage. Our faith in our government to protect us may not have been completely shattered, but it was most certainly compromised.
Steve Coll masterfully picks up the story in 1979 and brings it forward to 9/11. War, as we knew it, had changed. Even the Cold War, which was the byproduct of the dementia of two superpowers, had somehow satisfied the needs of those in power to wage war without actually, officially declaring it. As baffling as that time was, it is strange to feel so much nostalgia for it. It was an arms race, a war of brains rather than brawn. The invasion of Afghanistan changed the rules and left the Soviet Union vulnerable to fighting a lot more than a few ragged, underfed, undereducated poppy farmers.
The Players:
William J. Casey was the head of the CIA at this time. He still saw the Russian Bear as the greatest threat to America, and it was the reason he joined the organization. Ronald Reagan, as president, is a fervent anti-communist, as can be seen from many of his speeches going way back to when he was president of the Screen Actors Guild. The final piece to the puzzle that had to fall in place was one alcoholic, charismatic representative from Texas in need of a cause by the name of Charlie Wilson.
You’ve heard the term Charlie Wilson’s war? Well, he gave it to us.
America went to war with the Soviet Union. Well...not technically. They funnelled money, loads of money into Pakistan. (Carter offered President Zia of Pakistan $400 million, which he rejected. Reagan offered him $3.2 billion, which he accepted.) The region was choking on all the money. America was intent on buying an embarrassing defeat for the Soviet Union. The CIA had to get creative though, because it wasn’t like we could outfit these Afghanistan rebels with weapons stamped with MADE IN AMERICA. Somebody had the bright idea, later during the 1992-1996 push towards Kabul against Soviet supported Afghanistan troops, to go scoop up all those Soviet tanks and weaponry that Saddam Hussein left scattered all over the desert when he retreated from Kuwait. They refurbished them and handed them off to “our allies” in Afghanistan. I always enjoy a good recycling story.
Of course, the turning point came when we decided to let the rebels use Stinger missiles.
What this all really adds up to is a destabilized region that has become ripe for a lunatic with an endless supply of money and an ego the size of Jupiter to take over. Need more hints? He was frogmarched out of his native country of Saudi Arabia and stripped of his citizenship. The average height of a man from Saudi Arabia is 5’6”. He was almost a foot taller. He’s kind of an a$$hole.
The one and hopefully only Osama Bin Laden.
In the 1990s, America was going through a crisis of faith with the CIA. They were forcing veterans into early retirement and reducing the level of government commitment to the spy service just as Islamic terrorism was on the rise . If not for the emergence of George Tenet, the spy service might have slowly circled down the drain. He was exactly what the CIA needed, a gregarious, likeable man who knew how to talk politics.
Despite distractions from other world crises, including a near career ending domestic crisis involving a cigar and a blue dress, President Bill Clinton made several attempts to capture Bin Laden. He shot cruise missiles at him. He had the Persian Lion contacted, Ahmed Shah Massoud, possibly our best ally in Afghanistan, about a plan to take Bin Laden out. Unfortunately, American politics played a big part or most of us might never have known the name Bin Laden.
America relied too heavily on their two closest allies in the Middle East. ”Instead at first out of indifference, then with misgivings, and finally in a state of frustrated inertia--the United States endorsed year after year the Afghan programs of its two sullen, complex, and sometimes vital allies, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia.” These were two countries that had their own agendas with Afghanistan. Sometimes they helped America, and sometimes behind the scenes they were working against them.
Bin Laden wasn’t really interested in the squabbles going on in Afghanistan. He couldn’t care less about Russia or the other European powers. He wanted to go after the country that would give him the biggest bang for his buck. The United States of America. “Like bin Laden, Al-Zawahiri (current leader of Al-Qaeda) believed that it was time for jihadists to carry the war to ‘the distant enemy’ because, once provoked, the Americans would probably reply with revenge attacks and ‘personally wage the battle against the Muslims,’ which would make them ripe for a ‘clear-cut jihad against infidels.’”
Power was achieved through attention. It makes me doubt that their true intentions were as purely religiously motivated as they would like us to believe. They wanted to provoke the United States into attacking them. It wasn’t about revenge as much as it was about achieving glory through blood.
The brains at the CIA were, meanwhile, realizing a few things as well. ”A lesson of American counterterrorism efforts since the 1980s was that the threat could not be defeated, only ‘reduced, attenuated, and to some degree controlled. Terrorism was an inevitable feature of global change.”
Richard Clarke the American guru on terrorism.
As the Clinton administration was winding down, it became easier to start kicking decisions regarding terrorism and other policy issues down the road. Clinton didn’t want to make decisions that George W. Bush would have to live with. Bush, on the other hand, was almost punch drunk with a narrow presidential victory. Richard Clarke, the guru of terrorism under Clinton, had a hard time getting the attention of Bush or his National Security Advisor, Condoleezza Rice, about the pending threats of terrorism. 2001 turned out to be a bad time to be switching administrations.
Steve Coll, step by step, takes us through the minefield of the Middle East. He shows the mistakes and why they happened. He explains the intent and why sometimes America was right and sometimes very wrong in their approach to problems. We were slow to understand the motivations of certain individuals. Sometimes we were too proud to see how vulnerable we were. Sometimes we meddled in things best left to a regional conflict. You will see each president, possibly in a different light, as Coll explains the politics and the underlying concerns behind their decisions.
The Persian Lion had a vision for his country.
This is a book that, as I was reading it, I heard the snap of so many missing blocks of information fall into place. My understanding of how and why things happened the way they happened expanded exponentially. Our relationship with the Middle East is a complex and convoluted mess with misconceived and misinterpreted intentions on both sides. This is a serious book, well written, and meticulously researched.
Two days before 9/11 a Saudi Arabian man posing as a reporter blew himself up, sending shrapnel into the chest of Ahmad Shah Massoud. Bin Laden knew that once those planes hit those towers that America would come to Massoud. It was a huge blow to Afghanistan because finally everything would line up for Massoud to eventually control the country (with US backing), and Massoud could finally put into place the country he always dreamed of. As someone said: ”What an unlucky country.”
If you wish to see more of my most recent book and movie reviews, visit http://www.jeffreykeeten.com
I also have a Facebook blogger page at:https://www.facebook.com/JeffreyKeeten or you can catch some of my reviews on http://www.shelfinflicted.com/. English A hefty book,and it took me a good long while to finish it.But despite its sheer length,it kept my interest right through.
Steve Coll's research is exhaustive,and his insights worth reading.It won the Pulitzer Prize and deservedly so.
It gets off to a dramatic start as an angry mob attacks the US embassy in Islamabad,in 1979.The embassy had to be rebuilt later.
The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan was the event that would prompt the US to enter the conflict and heavily arm the Afghan resistance.
The CIA's covert support was massive,and the influx of arms into Afghanistan was huge as General Zia ul Haq became a key ally of the US.
The Saudis,fearful of the Soviets,entered the fray as well and matched American funding for what were then called the Mujahideen. The weapons being supplied to the Afghans became more and more sophisticated,without regard for future consequences.The CIA later had to repurchase Stinger missiles,fearing their misuse.
There's an in depth account of the activities of Afghan commanders including Ahmed Shah Massoud and Gulbadeen Hekmatyar,as they vied for power in the post Soviet vacuum.Neither could succeed as the warring factions were suddenly upstaged by the rise of the fundamentalist militia,The Taliban,headed by its one eyed leader,Mullah Omar.
US energy company Unocal sensed an opportunity to build a gas pipeline from Turkmenistan through Afghanistan to Pakistan and India.They tried to cultivate the Taliban,but without stability in Afghanistan,that pipeline would remain a pipe dream.
Meanwhile,Osama Bin Laden had arrived in Afghanistan during the Soviet war,and had become an influential figure.His criticism of the Saudi royals did not endear him to them.He fled to Sudan,and eventually had to leave that country as well,with Afghanistan once again becoming his destination.
The US repeatedly tried to kill him.The Clinton Administration fired Cruise missiles which passed through Pakistani air space before reaching Afghanistan.Bin Laden remained safe.Clinton was at the time embroiled in the impeachment proceedings.
On another occasion,Arab Sheikhs from the UAE were with Bin Laden,as the CIA contemplated killing him.But that would have killed the UAE royals,too.Nothing came of that plan as well.
In desperation,the US turned to Afghan Northern Alliance commander,Ahmed Shah Massoud to try and kill Bin Laden.Massoud was by now working with future Afghan President Hamid Karzai against the Taliban.
And then,just two days before 9/11,Ahmed Shah Massoud was assassinated by two Arab suicide bombers posing as journalists.That's where the book comes to an end and the author tells the story of later years in a subsequent volume. English “The downward spiral following the Cold War’s end was no less steep in, say, Congo or Rwanda than it was in Afghanistan. Yet for Americans on the morning of September 11, it was Afghanistan’s storm that struck. A war they hardly knew and an enemy they had barely met crossed oceans never traversed by the German Luftwaffe or the Soviet Rocket Forces to claim several thousand civilian lives in two mainland cities. How had this happened…?”
- Steve Coll, Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 11, 2001
If you want to read about the road that led to September 11, 2001, there are a lot of options to pick from. Many of these options – such as Lawrence Wright’s The Looming Tower – are quite good. With that said, Steve Coll’s Ghost Wars might be the best. Though it was published all the way back in 2004 – and has since been updated – I have little hesitation in saying that it will likely remain one of the best for years to come.
The reason is that Ghost Wars is not simply the tale of how it came to pass that nineteen hijackers used four airliners to topple two of the world’s largest buildings, triggering a military response that destabilized nations, killed hundreds of thousands, and cost trillions of dollars. Instead, it is a sweeping history of a beautiful and ancient country that has been cursed by geography to sit at the crossroads of empires.
To be sure, Coll’s opus is first and foremost about America’s Central Intelligence Agency, their response to the growing threat of terror in South Asia, and the many failures and shortfalls that marked this endeavor. Just as importantly, however, it is about the Afghanis themselves, and their struggle to win the peace after throwing the Soviet Union back across their borders. Their ultimate failure stemmed not only from ethnic and religions divisions within, but by power-players from without, including the United States, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan.
The tale told within these pages is epic in every sense of the word. It is big and complex, it is exciting and exhilarating. There are pitched battles, ambushes, and assassinations. There are flawed heroes and complicated villains and the weight of a long and bloody history resting upon the shoulders of all participants. At the end – concluding on September 10, 2001, at the sunset of our hopes for the 21st century – it is profoundly frustrating and heartbreaking. Ghost Wars is nearly 600-pages long, but with vivid writing and excellent pacing, it reads much shorter. When I came to the last page, I wanted more.
Ghost Wars is divided into three major sections. The first covers the Afghan-Soviet War that commenced with the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan on Christmas Eve of 1979. The war became a vortex, drawing in Arab fighters, Saudi money, and – in a gradual escalation – American weaponry. For the U.S., the goal was to embarrass the Soviet Union, to give them their own Vietnam. In the short term, they were successful; in the long term, there was a distinct lack of an endgame.
The second section covers Afghanistan in the post-Soviet period with various factions vying for power. During this period, the Taliban rose to the fore, committed to an extremely conservative interpretation of Islam. Backed by elements of the ISI – Pakistan’s powerful Inter-Service Intelligence – the Taliban consolidated authority under the one-eyed Mullah Omar.
The third and final portion of Ghost Wars follows Osama bin Laden as he is forced from Saudi Arabia and the Sudan, and takes refuge in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan. There, he begins to focus on “the distant enemy,” meaning the United States. Hiding in plain sight, Coll narrates the many opportunities that America had to potentially capture or kill bin Laden, while also reminding you that – had such an opportunity been acted upon – the potential blowback was extremely high.
Everything about Ghost Wars works at the highest level. The organization is first rate, and despite the veritable sea of information presented, I never struggled to keep my head above water. The writing is excellent, and Coll shows himself able to devise a crackling set piece (he does a great job with the siege of the American embassy in Islamabad), marvelously describe the various settings, and to credibly interpret the actions and motives of the major players. Even though three different intelligence agencies were weaving a skein of deceptions and lies, Coll somehow manages to lead the reader through it without getting lost in “the wilderness of mirrors.”
The characterizations are excellent, reminding you that this is foremost a human story (a dramatis personae is provided, to keep everyone straight). I especially liked Coll's depictions of Prince Turki al-Faisal, the Saudi intelligence chief who moved smoothly between east and west, playing both ends against the middle, and CIA Director George Tenet, a people-pleaser and compromise choice to lead the agency, who was suddenly thrust into one of the most important positions in American government. Most memorable of all is Ahmed Shah Massoud, the famed “Lion of the Panjshir,” a multilingual warrior-intellectual, who waged armed resistance from the north of Afghanistan, but who also enjoyed his trips to Paris. On the event of bin Laden’s fateful “planes operation,” Massoud was the target of a coup d'état, removing him from the chessboard at the moment he was needed most.
Underlying the sheer force of the storytelling is an enormous amount of research. There are seventy-seven two-columned pages of annotated notes, attesting to hundreds of interviews that Coll conducted himself. This is further girded by his travels in the region, which adds to the sense of place. It’s not simply that Coll gathered so much, it’s that he has such a sure grip on this information.
By the end of Ghost Wars, all the mistakes have been laid bare. Some errors are clear only with hindsight. For example, knowing what bin Laden would eventually do, it’s obvious that stronger efforts should have been made to neutralize him, regardless of the cost. Of course, at the time, bin Laden had not yet executed his infamous deed, and it would’ve been a lot harder to justify – for instance – laying waste to his Tarnak Farm compound, which would’ve killed many noncombatants. Other failures came from an inability to focus on or prioritize Afghanistan as an issue. President Clinton's impeachment, for instance, fatally weakened his administration and kept kept him from taking certain actions that probably should’ve been taken.
(Since I brought up Clinton, it’s worth noting that Coll does not exhibit any specific political grudges. Every American President in this timeframe – Carter, Reagan, Bush, Clinton, and G.W. Bush – contributed to the catastrophe. Coll does not let anyone skate, though he does not necessarily condemn anyone either. He mostly tells the story, and leaves the conclusions to the reader).
As Coll makes clear, it would be ludicrous to chalk everything up to American ineptitude. There were other players involved, chiefly Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, both of which played a double game. The Saudi Royal Family was happy to keep U.S. military muscle on hand, but also had to placate the intense religious feelings of their people. The result is that bin Laden – instead of being arrested – was allowed to quietly leave the country. Pakistan played an even bigger role in events. While acting the part of an American ally, they were also busy funding Afghani training camps, hoping to use those fighters to do battle in the Kashmir region. While America can be faulted for its choice of friends – Coll suggests that the U.S. would’ve been better served strengthening ties with India – it is also a fact that Saudi Arabia and Pakistan were independent agents making their own decisions for their own ends.
By the time I reached the final page, I felt a certain resignation. I was not convinced that things could have been changed, even if we sent someone back in time to do things differently. There are simply too many factors, too many variables, to say that the outcome could’ve been altered. Even killing bin Laden might not have been enough, as it was Khaled Sheikh Mohammed who truly masterminded the 9/11 plot. To read this history is to feel a sense of dark destiny hovering over Afghanistan. In his novel Kim, Rudyard Kipling wrote that “when everyone is dead, the Great Game is finished.” Part of me wonders if he might be right. English This is probably the definitive work on the history of US involvement in the Afghanistan war against the Soviets and the resulting blowback.
Coll begins with the Islamabad riot of 1979, in which thousands of Islamic militants laid waste to the US embassy while Zia was riding about on a bicycle distributing unrelated leaflets, and accompanied by much of his military. Did he know about the plan and make himself deliberately unavailable? It is clear that he had an agenda of his own in dealing with the USA. Fearful of India to his south and the USSR to his north he was eager to keep the Russians at bay, using Afghanistan as a buffer state. He was also beset from within politically, so made a decision that might seem right at home in Saudi Arabia, he enabled the fundamentalists. He was also eager to keep the Pashtuns who straddled the Afghani-Pakistani border from becoming too powerful, and forming their own country. Thus, aid to Afghanistan resistance fighters was focused on non-Pashtun players.
Channeling all aid through the ISI (Inter-Services Intelligence, the primary intel entity in the country, the tail that wags the Pakistani dog. There are significant numbers of Taliban sympathizers within the organization.) meant that the USA was allowing that extremist entity to affect the future in all Central Asia, fomenting fundamentalist Islam throughout the region. Coll offers accounts of William Casey sponsoring actions that were well beyond his authority, and that risked conflagration, such as sponsoring incursions by the Islamists into the Soviet Union.
When the USA denied aid to Pakistan because of the nuclear bomb issue, Saudi Arabia stepped in and kept the money flowing, increasing their influence and the power of the ISI.
Ahmed Massoud was not a Pashtun, but a Tajik, hailing from the northeast of Afghanistan, the Panjshir Valley. He was not only a gifted strategist, but a politician as well. While fighting the Russians for years he was also bargaining with them, finally achieving a cease fire, to the chagrin of the other resistance leaders, most notably Hekmatyar, who regarded him as a Benedict Arnold for dealing with the enemy.
The role of the UNOCAL deal – the US wanted to provide a way for Central Asian republics to get their oil and gas to market without it having to go through Russia. Also Pakistan had an interest in buying petro from them. They needed a stable, unified regime in Afghanistan in order to make it possible to build a pipeline there.
Coll looks at the responses of four US administrations regarding Afghanistan, Reagan, Bush, Clinton and Bush jr. He looks at the complications of governing this multi-ethnic society and how external politics affected its existence. Soviet pressure, Pakistan desire to use Afghanistan as a buffer state, the US wanting to pursue bin Laden, Saudi Arabia looking to spread Islam and contain Iran. He looks at some of the religious differences, noting that the Taliban was decidedly Sunni, despite Condeleeza’s mistaken notion that they were one with Iran.
This is a masterwork, covering a lot, A LOT of territory. If you have any interest in events in the Stans, in the Indian subcontinent or in US foreign policy, this is an absolute must read.
P 104
Drawing on his experiences running dissident Polish exiles as agents behind Nazi lines, [CIA chief William] Casey decided to revive the CIA’s propaganda proposals targeting Central Asia. The CIA’ specialists proposed to send in books about Central Asian culture and historical Soviet atrocities in the region. The ISI’s generals said they would prefer to ship Korans in the local languages…the CIA printed thousands of copies of the Muslim book and shipped them to Pakistan for distribution to the Mujahidin
P 132
[As part of their tactics, Afghani insurgents targeted Russians in Kabul] Fear of poisoning, surprise attacks, and assassination became rife among Russian officers and soldiers in Kabul. The rebels fashioned booby-trapped bombs from gooey black contact explosives, supplied to Pakistani intelligence by the CIA, that could be molded into ordinary shapes or poured into innocent utensils. Russian soldiers began to find bombs made from pens, watches, cigarette lighters, and tape recorders…Kabul shopkeepers poisoned food eaten by Russian soldiers.
P 134
Afghans…uniformly denounced suicide attack proposals as against their religion. It was only the Arab volunteers—from Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Algeria and other countries, who had been raised in an entirely different culture, spoke their own language, and preached their own interpretations of Islam while fighting far from their homes and families—who later advocated suicide attacks. Afghan jihadists, tightly woven into family, clan, and regional social networks, never embraced suicide tactics in significant numbers.
It is clear that there is a very real divide within Pakistan between the civilian leadership and the military. The latter is vastly influenced by Islamic extremists. Because the CIA was not interested in delving into local politics, they allowed the ISI to control the funds we were providing. This was not the same as allowing the Paki government to control it. Their interests were not identical.
There also developed a divergence between the focus of the CIA and the State department. CIA was wedded to the ISI, whereas State, particularly via reports by dissidents (Edmund McWilliams, Peter Tomsen) sent back through channels that bypassed the CIA, became more inclined to attempt to achieve some sort of rapprochement among the elements. ISI had favorites and was channeling resources to them. Those resources were turned on other mujahidin. Hekmatyar, for example, tried to wipe out all his opposition, and did a pretty good number on Massoud’s officer corps.
P 165
[In 1987] The CIA did not account for the massive weight of private Saudi and Arab funding that tilted the field (of anti-soviets) toward the Islamists—up to $25 milion a month by Bearden’s own estimate. Nor did they account for the intimate tactical and strategic partnerships between Pakistani intelligence and the Afghan Islamists, expecially along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border. By the late 1908s ISI had effectively eliminated all the secular, leftist, and royalist political parties that had first formed when Afghan refugees fled communist rule.
P 168
A year before they left Afghanistan, the Soviet informed the US that they would be leaving [George’ Shultz was so struck by the significance of the news that it half-panicked him. He feared that if he told the right-wingers in Reagan’s cabinet that Shevardnaze had said, and endorsed the disclosure as sincere, he would be accused of going soft on Moscow. He kept the conversation to himself for weeks.
Shevardnaze had asked for American cooperation in limiting the spread of “Islamic fundamentalism.” Schultz was sympathetic, but no high-level Reagan administration officials ever gave much thought to the issue…the warnings were just a way to deflect attention from Soviet failings, American hard-liners decided.
P 475
[for Pakistan] The jihadist guerrillas were a more practical day-to-day strategic defense against Indian hegemony than even a nuclear bomb.
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