> Skip to content
  • Published: 1 February 2018
  • ISBN: 9780718194482
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 720
Categories:

Directorate S

The C.I.A. and America's Secret Wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan, 2001–2016




Following on from Coll's Pulitzer Prize winning GHOST WARS, this takes the story of America's grim involvement in the affairs of Afghanistan from 2001 to 2016

In the wake of the terrible shock of 9/11, the C.I.A. scrambled to work out how to destroy Bin Laden and his associates. The C.I.A. had long familiarity with Afghanistan and had worked closely with the Taliban to defeat the Soviet Union there. A tangle of assumptions, old contacts, favours and animosities were now reactivated. Superficially the invasion was quick and efficient, but Bin Laden's successful escape, together with that of much of the Taliban leadership, and a catastrophic failure to define the limits of NATO's mission in a tough, impoverished country the size of Texas, created a quagmire which lasted many years.

At the heart of the problem lay 'Directorate S', a highly secretive arm of the Pakistan state which had its own views on the Taliban and Afghanistan's place in a wider competition for influence between Pakistan, India and China, and which assumed that the U.S.A. and its allies would soon be leaving.

Steve Coll's remarkable new book tells a powerful, bitter story of just how badly foreign policy decisions can go wrong and of many lives lost.

  • Published: 1 February 2018
  • ISBN: 9780718194482
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 720
Categories:

About the author

Steve Coll

Steve Coll is most recently the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning bestseller Ghost Wars. He also won a 1990 Pulitzer Prize for explanatory journalism. He covered Afghanistan as the Washington Post's South Asia bureau chief between 1989 and 1992 and has been the Post's managing editor since 1998. He is the author of five books, including On the Grand Trunk Road and The Taking of Getty Oil. He lives with his wife and three children in Maryland.

Also by Steve Coll

See all