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The C.I.A. and America's Secret Wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan
by Steve Coll
From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Ghost Wars, the epic and enthralling story of America's intelligence, military, and diplomatic efforts to defeat Al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan since 9/11.
Prior to 9/11, the United States had been carrying out small-scale covert operations in Afghanistan, ostensibly in cooperation, although often in direct opposition, with I.S.I., the Pakistani intelligence agency. While the US was trying to quell extremists, a highly secretive and compartmentalized wing of I.S.I., known as "Directorate S," was covertly training, arming, and seeking to legitimize the Taliban, in order to enlarge Pakistan's sphere of influence. After 9/11, when fifty-nine countries, led by the U. S., deployed troops or provided aid to Afghanistan in an effort to flush out the Taliban and Al Qaeda, the U.S. was set on an invisible slow-motion collision course with Pakistan.
Today we know that the war in Afghanistan would falter badly because of military hubris at the highest levels of the Pentagon, the drain on resources and provocation in the Muslim world caused by the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, and corruption. But more than anything, as Coll makes painfully clear, the war in Afghanistan was doomed because of the failure of the United States to apprehend the motivations and intentions of I.S.I.'s "Directorate S". This was a swirling and shadowy struggle of historic proportions, which endured over a decade and across both the Bush and Obama administrations, involving multiple secret intelligence agencies, a litany of incongruous strategies and tactics, and dozens of players, including some of the most prominent military and political figures. A sprawling American tragedy, the war was an open clash of arms but also a covert melee of ideas, secrets, and subterranean violence.
Coll excavates this grand battle, which took place away from the gaze of the American public. With unsurpassed expertise, original research, and attention to detail, he brings to life a narrative at once vast and intricate, local and global, propulsive and painstaking.
This is the definitive explanation of how America came to be so badly ensnared in an elaborate, factional, and seemingly interminable conflict in South Asia. Nothing less than a forensic examination of the personal and political forces that shape world history, Directorate S is a complete masterpiece of both investigative and narrative journalism.
National Book Critics Circle Awards, 2018
"Starred Review. The most comprehensive work to date on the U.S. war in Afghanistan…Coll's vital work provides a factual and analytical foundation for all future work on the Afghan War and U.S. policy in Central Asia." - Publisher's Weekly
"Starred Review. With his evenhanded approach, gift for limning character, and dazzling reporting skills, he has created an essential work of contemporary history." - Booklist
"Starred Review. In this era of fake news, Coll remains above it all, this time delivering an impeccably researched history of diplomacy at the highest levels of government in Washington, Islamabad, and Kabul." - Kirkus Reviews
"Coll's book is riveting" - Richard Cohen, NY Daily News
"Spellbinding... It does for America in Afghanistan what Michael Gordon and Tom Ricks did for the Iraq misadventure in Cobra II and Fiasco." - The Evening Standard (UK)
"This sequel to Ghost Wars might well become the definitive account of the CIA and America's secret wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan ... the story is delivered with a literary prowess that has been absent in previous western accounts of America's longest running war. The dance of blame, with the US swaying at one moment towards Pakistan and the next towards Afghanistan, is a choreography familiar to CIA chiefs, US presidents and writers who have tackled the subject. Coll refuses to follow this tired tune, and the result is masterful." - The Guardian (UK)
"Steve Coll's Directorate S is the sequel to his magisterial Ghost Wars. Both books rest on a foundation of serious scholarship and Coll's extraordinary access, to individual CIA officers mostly, but also to many others...Every assertion is carefully sourced and checked. This book is in the finest traditions of American investigative journalism. Coll is the thinking man's Michael Wolff." - The Times of London (UK)
"A spectacular account of 15 years of secret CIA and US military operations in Afghanistan and Pakistan by the investigative journalist and academic Steve Coll ...With impressive access to American, Afghan and Pakistani intelligence, Coll reveals the extent of the surveillance undertaken by all sides." - The Financial Times (UK)
This information about Directorate S was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Steve Coll is the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Ghost Wars and the dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University, and from 2007 to 2013 was president of the New America Foundation, a public policy institute in Washington, D.C. He is a staff writer for The New Yorker, and previously worked for twenty years at he Washington Post, where he received a Pulitzer Prize for explanatory journalism in 1990. He is the author of seven other books, including On the Grand Trunk Road, The Bin Ladens, Private Empire, and Directorate S.
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