On balance this is a well researched book (albeit with a Langley-Saudi partiality that must be noted), and I give it high marks for substance, story, and notes. It should be read in tandem with several other books, including George Crile's "Charlie Wilson's War: The Extraordinary Story of the Largest Covert Operation in History" and the Milt Bearden/James Risen tome on "The Main Enemy: The Inside Story of the CIA's Final Showdown with the KGB."

The most important point in the book is not one the author intended to make. He inadvertently but most helpfully points to the fact that at no time did the U.S. government, in lacking a policy on Afghanistan across several Administrations, think about the strategic implications of "big money movements." I refer to Saudi Oil, Afghan Drugs, and CIA Cash.

Early on the book shows that Afghanistan was not important to the incumbent Administration, and that the Directorate of Operations, which treats third-world countries as hunting grounds for Soviets rather than targets in their own right, had eliminated Afghanistan as a "collection objective" in the late 1980's through the early 1990's. It should be no surprise that the CIA consequently failed to predict the fall of Kabul (or in later years, the rise of the Taliban).

Iran plays heavily in the book, and that is one of the book's strong points. From the 1979 riots against the U.S. Embassies in Iran and in Pakistan, to the end of the book, the hand of Iran is clearly perceived. As we reflect on Iran's enormous success in 2002-2004 in using Chalabi to deceive the Bush Administration into wiping out Saddam Hussein and opening Iraq for Iranian capture, at a cost to the US taxpayer of over $400 billion dollars, we can only compare Iran to the leadership of North Viet-Nam. Iran has a strategic culture, the US does not. The North Vietnamese beat the US for that reason. Absent the development of a strategic culture within the US, one that is not corrupted by ideological fantasy, Iran will ultimately beat the US and Israel in the Middle East.

The greatest failure of the CIA comes across throughout early in the book: the CIA missed the radicalization of Islam and its implications for global destabilization. It did so for three reasons: 1) CIA obsession with hard targets to the detriment of global coverage; 2) CIA obsession with technical secrets rather than human overt and covert information; and 3) CIA laziness and political naivete in relying on foreign liaison, and especially on Saudi Arabia and Pakistan.

Both Admiral Stansfield Turner and Dr. Zbigniew Brzezinski come in for criticism here. Turner for gutting the CIA, Brzezinski for telling Pakistan it could go nuclear (page 51) in return for help against the Soviets in Afghanistan.

Although the book does not focus on Bin Laden until he becomes a player in Afghanistan, it does provide much better discussion of Bin Laden's very close relations with Saudi intelligence, including the Chief of Staff of Saudi intelligence at the time, Bin Laden's former teacher and mentor. There appears to be no question, from this and other sources, including Yossef Bodansky's book on Bin Laden and David Kaplan's US News & World Report on Saudi sponsorship of global terrorism, that Bin Laden has been the primary Saudi intelligence agent of influence for exporting terrorism and Islamic radicalism to South Asia, the Pacific Rim, Africa, Europe, Russia, and the US. CIA and the FBI failed to detect this global threat, and the USG failed to understand that World War III started in 1989. As with other evils, the US obsession about communism led it to sponsor new emerging threats that might not otherwise have become real. However, the book also provides the first documentation I have seen that Bin Laden was "noticed" by the CIA in 1985 (page 146), and that Bin Laden opened his US office in 1986. It was also about this time that the Russian "got it" on the radical Islamic threat, told the US, and got blown off. Bob Gates and George Shultz were wrong to doubt the Soviets when they laid out Soviet plans to leave Afghanistan and Soviet concern about both the future of Afghanistan and the emerging threat from Islamic terrorism.

The middle of the book can be considered a case study in how Pakistani deception combined with American ignorance led us to make many errors of judgment. Some US experts did see the situation clearly--Ed McWilliams from State ("Evil Little Person" per Milt Bearden) comes out of this book looking very very smart.

The final portions of the book are detailed and balanced. What comes across is both a failure of the US to think strategically, and the incredibly intelligent manner in which Bin Laden does think globally, strategically, and unconventionally. Bin Laden understands the new equation: low-cost terrorism equals very high cost economic dislocation.

Side note: CIA provided the Islamic warriors in Afghanistan with enough explosives to blow up half of New York (page 135), and with over 2000 Stinger missiles, 600 of which appear to remain in the hands of anti-US forces today, possibly including a number shipped to Iran for re-purposing (ie London, Dallas, Houston)

One final note: morality matters. I am greatly impressed with the author's judgment in focusing on the importance that Bin Laden places on the corruption of US and Saudi Arabian governments and corporations as the justification for his jihad. Will and Ariel Durant, in "The Lessons of History," make a special point of discussing the long-term strategic value of morality as a "force" that impacts on the destiny of nations and peoples. The US has lost that part of the battle, for now, and before we can beat Bin Laden, we must first clean our own house and demand that the Saudi's clean theirs or be abandoned as a US ally. Morality matters. Strategic culture matters. On these two counts, Bin Laden is winning for now.


Who edits the managing editor ?   March 3, 2004
 33 out of 72 found this review helpful

Despite favorable reviews, one might ask: who dared to edit this tome ? Seemingly no one. Coll is like a draftsman; heavy on detail, good red lines, straight right angles but weak on telling a good tale and moving the story along for the general reader. The reader does not need to know of all the feuds between the Afghan tribes and the CIA and the State Department. A David Halberstam would have knocked this book off in 350 pages, Coll takes another 125 weighty pages to tell the same story. The Washington set may call it the definitive history of the CIA's involvement in the Afghan War but it is questionable if the general reading public will wade through the book to the end.


A good reason to read non fiction   June 19, 2004
 31 out of 33 found this review helpful

Since it appears that the U.S. is inexorably involved in this part of the world - a CNN commentator and former general predicted recently that the current war on terror was unlikely to end in our lifetime - I have departed from my usual reading habit of serious fiction and forced myself into a brave new world of non fiction, consuming Ghost Wars (Coll), Against All Enemies (Clarke) and Plan of Attack (Woodward) over the past few weeks. Of the three, I found Coll's the most interesting, immersing myself in the detailed account of mid level CIA operatives, Washington bureaucrats and policy makers focused on the South Asia region, bracketed in time from the take over of the American embassy in Pakistan and the narrow avoidance of massive American casualties at the hands of Muslim extremists in 1979, up to but short of 9/11.

Having no expertise in the region, it's difficult to evaluate the accuracy of Coll's account. However, his narrative appears remarkably free of partisan finger pointing as Coll faults Robin Raphel, Clinton's assistant secretary of state for South Asia, for her relative inexperience and naivete as she serves as apologist for the Taliban while working to keep the U.S. neutral in the Afghan civil war, while highlighting Hillary Clinton's important role in defending women's rights and increasing awareness among the American people of the dangers posed by that regime. Bill Clinton, himself, is shown in both positive and negative aspects as he recognizes relatively early on the dangers that Muslim terrorism poses for the homeland, while at other times, notably in an early meeting in 1993 with Saudi ambassador Prince Bandar and Saudi spy chief Prince Turki, he conducts a "typical Clinton session, more seminar than formal meeting," asking his guests' opinions of where US foreign policy should go, leaving the Saudi's confused, "He's asking us?"

Overall, I came away from the book more convinced than ever that America's historic desire to disengage from the world will not be a successful strategy in a post 9/11 world. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, we walked away from Afghanistan, redirecting American aid to Africa, and for long stretches had no CIA personnel located in that country. Our counter terrorism efforts were largely administered through untrustworthy clients like Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, who diverted American resources to their own ends. When faced with overwhelming evidence that Osama bin Laden had planned and executed major terrorist attacks against Americans and our embassies late in Clinton's term of office, we had few military options because we had little ability to project American power into this remote area of the globe. In 1999, we had 60,000 American soldiers stationed in Germany facing a non existent Soviet threat,. but lacked the strength to take out a few terrorist training camps in Afghanistan.

Perhaps the most important contribution of this book is remind America citizens that the world is indeed a much smaller place than it once was, and ocean barriers provide significantly less security than they have in the past.


The CIA had too much information, and so does this book.   April 20, 2004
 24 out of 32 found this review helpful

This book is selling very nicely and obviously has prompted Congressional hearing questions. Unfortunately, it suffers from the same weakness that kept the US government from preventing the September 11 attacks: It has too much information of varying quality, badly organized and poorly analyzed. You might learn more and more easily about US actions in Afghanistan by reading the reviews of this book.

Three years in South Asia clearly gave Steve Coll some personal acquaintance with people, places and events. He combined that with voluminous documentary evidence, and the result is War and Peace Goes To Afghanistan. A reader who slogs through this book will read a lot about the topic, but won't come out with a clear conclusion, and won't gain the most reliable understanding. When I find errors in the discussion of topics that I know about, I suspect that the same sort of errors exist in areas where I'm less knowledgeable.

More understanding of the military, CIA and State Department would have avoided the errors that lard the book's first hundred pages. Throughout the book, Coll misstates the name of the Counterterrorism (not "-ist") Center at the CIA. The 1980 Teheran embassy rescue helicopter crash happened not because the helicopters were "sand-blown" (pg. 55) but because a pilot undertook an exceedingly difficult hover in the high wind and blowing sand at night. Is a British Enfield rifle more powerful than a Russian AK-47 rifle (pg. 58, and no, it isn't) or vice-versa (pg. 66), or did Coll misunderstand when his source told him what was being said to the Afghanis at different times? Who thinks the Secretary of State actually writes a routine briefing memorandum (pg. 62) for the President? The Salang Highway is west, not east of the Panjshir Valley (pg. 115, right above the map). The writing is florid (safehouses were unmarked, what's a fusillade if not gunfire?, and the 1979 Soviet invasion was "hegemonic violence.") Why write that the President "scrawled" his name on a presidential finding that covert action is in the national interest? Occasionally, the adjectives clank ("Soviet bomber-jets", "brass-polish outsiders" and "eye-tearing rivalry"). None of this is very serious except that it all suggests a superficial understanding and a lack of editorial care.

It's clear that Coll interviewed lots of CIA officers, but he swallowed and uncritically repeats self-justifications, allowed extraneous detail to distract him from important concerns, and missed an opportunity to write real history; Instead, this book is journalism (and I intend that to be derogatory.) CIA officers' back-biting comments sold Coll on a dichotomy in CIA between the Eastern snob establishment tennis players and working-class Midwestern bowlers, ignoring the agency's many years of heavy recruiting in America's heartland and the absence of bowling alleys in suburban Washington. The real culture war inside CIA has long been between the cowboys and those who are more careful and disciplined. When Coll mentions "the mundane details of shipping and finance" (pg. 65), one should imagine the private satisfaction of a CIA officer who has just led the journalist right past some sensitive methods and truly covert operations.

There's always a tension between writing an interesting story and reaching for sensation. Without evidence or even an attributable allegation that CIA officers contacted Osama bin Laden, and despite Coll's description of CIA officers' repeated denials and the absence of documentary evidence of such contact, Coll probably ought to apologize for having written that "If the CIA did have contact with bin Laden during the 1980s and subsequently covered it up, it has so far done an excellent job." If the question referred to wife-beating, an individual might get really angry at reading that he had denied doing it, there was no proof that he had ever started doing it, much less stopped, but he might have been covering up anyway.

Many authors acknowledge the assistance of expert readers who have looked over a manuscript and helped by pointing out errors. This book would have benefitted from such help, as well as the services of a good literary and copy editor.

In addition to books recommended by other reviewers here, I'd recommend Milt Bearden's novel, The Black Tulip.


inside the tactical ops   April 14, 2004
 20 out of 27 found this review helpful

Coll has written an inside history of the CIA in Afghanistan that seems revealing on a nuts-and-bolts level, but fails to address the big picture. I am writing this review on the day that George Tenet is testifying before the 9/11 Commission, and Coll's work is directly relevant.

What does GHOST WARS cover? It gives a brief overview of the massive CIA program to arm the Afghan mujahadin against the Soviets in the 1980s. There is a tantalizing brief mention of Usama Bin Laden's (UBL) role in this, but do you suspect that what we are told is a partial account? It ends the day before 9/11. So what it covers in some detail is the period between the Soviet withdrawal and 9/11, including the period of civil war among warlords, the rise of the Taliban, and UBL estblishing his base there, and the story is told mainly from the point of view of mid-level CIA officials who were responsible for tracking UBL and al Qaeda. These officers, some only referred to as "Mike" and "Rich" to protect their identities (Mike we now know is Mike Scheuer, who has written IMPERIAL HUBRIS), were clearly consumed by their task and did all in their power to succeed in the years between 1997 and 9/11. Tenet, Black and other higher-ups are also portrayed as being quite focused on the threat and doing what they could. Coll's book doesn't provide any startling evidence to suggest a radical change one way or another in the Clinton-Bush transition.

The most interesting part of the book is in the details of surveillance and planned ops -- UBL is watched making a regular circuit with his convoy of SUVs in Afghanistan from his base in Kandahar looping around to the NW and back. The Pakistani military is monitored for beards -- Islamic fundamentalists are required not to cut their beards, and so this would be an indication of a fundamentalist takeover of the Pakistani military. A group of UAE sheikhs goes hunting with hawks in Afghanistan, and the CIA group monitoring UBL thinks he is there -- a missile strike is considered, but rejected.

If you find this level of detail interesting, you will enjoy Coll's book. I found more interesting what was left out. There is little or no discussion of U.S. strategy in all the profusion of tactical details. What about oil? What about Unocal and pipelines to carry oil and natural gas from Turkmenistan through Afghanistan? What about our questionable alliances with the Saudis and Pakistan? Coll's reporting offers little by way of answers, and mainly raises more questions. Plus, frankly, I am suspicious even of what is revealed, given the likelihood that important pieces are still classified. Overall, perhaps a good read for those thinking on the level of "getting the bad guys," but of limited value for those of us wondering about what is creating the bad guys, including U.S. strategy, and how to change the conditions that continue to create them.