Do you want to read an authentic account of the covert goings on in the CIA, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan from 1980 onwards, leading inexorably to Sep.11 2001? Do you want to know how Presidents Bush (Sr.) and Bill Clinton were indifferent and ignored dire warnings about  the dangers of Afghan politics? Do you want to know how hundreds of millions of unaccounted US dollars and countless millions worth of arms were given away by USA to Pakistan’s ISI and to Al qaida and Afghan warlords in return in the long run for big trouble, culminating in 9/11?

Read Steve Coll’s "Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan and bin Laden from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001".

 

Steve Coll has all the credentials for writing this authoritative volume. He has been the Managing Editor of Washington Post, has a Pulitzer under his belt and has had access to several highly placed, unimpeachable sources of his own. Coll’s writing is extensively researched with copious references and packed with accurate facts and figures, references and cross-references, notes and bibliography. Yet this book is a page-turner and reads like a suspense novel because Steve Coll has a racy style and an uncanny feel for contemporary history. His insight into the significance of events leading to 9/11 and the manner he has cogently narrated them makes the reader often forget that this is not a thriller fiction!

The main thread running through Coll’s account is the way Afghanistan was turned into a killing field for several local and global internecine warring groups even as the Soviet invasion failed. CIA was recklessly backing Pakistan and its ISI and pouring money and arms that were blatantly misused and misappropriated. Afghanistan, abandoned by Soviet Union as unwinnable, became the confluence of Wahabi fundamentalists from Saudi Arabia, deobandi extremists from Pakistan and Afghanistan’s own Taliban, backed by Al qaida’s network, to  tragically play out their individual jihadi agendas. In the early days of the Afghan war, USA was blinded by its sole aim of trouncing Soviet Union in Afghanistan and made serious compromises along the way, leaving no escape routes or exit strategy for themselves. Money and weapons from USA funneled mostly through Pakistan’s ISI, was supplemented by huge poppy exports from Afghanistan. All along a Saudi Arabian called Bin laden,  his sinews tested in the Sudanese killing fields, backed by his lieutenant Mulla Omar, spent millions of his own Saudi money, moved into Afghanistan and built a vast area of influence in the Kandahar region, training Arab, Kashmiri and Afghan jihadis in the art of assassination, sabotage and destruction. When carrot and stick policies failed, he was disowned by Saudi Arabia whose attitude to all jihadist groups continues to this day to be at best equivocal. This was compounded by the multiple machinations and intrigues, in Khartoum, Kabul, Quetta, Peshawar, Rawalpindi, Washington and Riyadh – all of which Coll exposes so convincingly, connecting the dots leading from some of the most unlikely places and people.

Coll brings his amazing insight into the duplicitous role of ISI and Pakistan’s military and their influence over the sometimes naïve officials of the CIA, the White House and the State Department. He lists the dates, happenings and the outcomes of various moves and seldom gives his own opinions.

The results of America's colossal mistakes were tragic – like the assassination of the Tajik leader Ahmed Shah Massoud two days before 9/11 by two Al qaeda Tunisians posing as TV crew and acts of terrorism aimed at the US - inside the US, in Africa, Aden and elsewhere, executed adroitly on orders by Bin Laden and Mulla Omar.

In hindsight, the best bet for USA would have been to back Massoud, known as the Lion of Panjshir, but the ISI would not let it happen as they were backing Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, the Pashto leader built by Z.A. Bhutto. 

India and Kashmir were never out of bin Laden’s radar either. It suited the ISI to draw jihadis from among Afghan guerillas to fight in Kashmir because they could not count on  their own Kashmiris’ total loyalty. 

But Pakistan overstepped. Musharraf, with tacit approval from Sharif, scripted the Kargil misadventure. President Clinton firmly clobbered them and ordered Pakistan’s withdrawal from Kargil.

The following lines from Coll’s book deserve quoting:

The opportunities missed by the United States on the way to September 2001 extended well beyond the failure to exploit fully an alliance with Massoud. Indifference, lassitude, blindness, paralysis and commercial greed too often shaped American foreign policy in Afghanistan and South Asia during the1990s. Besides Massoud, the most natural American ally against al Qaeda in the region was India, whose democracy and civilian population also was threatened by Islamic violence. Yet, while the American government sought gradually to deepen its ties to New Delhi, it lacked the creativity, local knowledge, patience and persistence to cope successfully with India’s prickly nationalism and complex democratic politics – a failure especially ironic given the ornery character of American nationalism and the great complexities of Washington’s own democracy. As a result, America failed during the late 1990s to forge an effective anti- terrorism partnership with India, whose regional interests, security resources and vast Muslim population offered great potential for covert penetrations of Afghanistan.