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Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001
 
 

Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001 [Paperback]

Steve Coll
4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (39 customer reviews)
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Product Details


Product Description

Review

"Certainly the finest historical narrative so far on the origins of al Qaeda in the post-Soviet rubble of Afghanistan . . . Ghost Wars provides fresh details and helps explain the motivations behind many crucial decisions."
-The New York Times Book Review

Book Description

The explosive first-hand account of America's secret history in Afghanistan

With the publication of Ghost Wars, Steve Coll became not only a Pulitzer Prize winner, but also the expert on the rise of the Taliban, the emergence of Bin Laden, and the secret efforts by CIA officers and their agents to capture or kill Bin Laden in Afghanistan after 1998.


Inside This Book (Learn More)
First Sentence
IN THE TATTERED, cargo-strewn cabin of an Ariana Afghan Airlines passenger jet streaking above Punjab toward Kabul sat a stocky, broad-faced American with short graying hair. Read the first page
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Concordance
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Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover
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Customer Reviews

39 Reviews
5 star:
 (19)
4 star:
 (11)
3 star:
 (6)
2 star:
 (2)
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Average Customer Review
4.2 out of 5 stars (39 customer reviews)
 
 
 
 
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8 of 8 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars Ghost Wars and a wilderness of mirrors, July 17 2004
This review is from: Ghost Wars (Hardcover)
The elusiveness of Bin Laden and the failures of the US government to get him is the theme of this great book. Coll has produced a masterpiece of investigative journalism. His book is amply documented and footnoted. However, some of his crucial interviews are left anonymous or unattributed and the identities of these sources would be very valuable to an evaluation of the overall history of this period.

Coll paints a broad and detailed picture of intelligence operations from the invasion of Afghanistan by the USSR up to the attacks upon the World Trade Center in 2001, and he clearly shows how the US effort to defeat the USSR in that country, eventually led to the rise of Bin Laden and Muslim radicalism. The United States and Saudi Arabia gave huge amounts of government largesse to fund the radical Muslims, who did all the fighting and dying to defeat the Communists. Too much credit is given to Reagan for "defeating" Soviet Communism and little is said about the actual people who died for the Muslim cause of defeating the infidels. Also, little is said about the law of unintended consequences, wherein the rise of the radical Muslim mentality was originally fostered via the US strategy by Reagan and his CIA chief William Casey. So in this connection, Bin Laden and 9/11 is a form of "blowback".

The picture painted by Coll of intelligence agents trying to get Bin Laden is curious indeed, since the effort to track him and corner him was very good at times, yet when he could have been caught or killed, the agents backed out or the intelligence agencies seemed paralyzed to follow through. This seems like a fruitful area of study for further books searching for the real truth of this secret history.

Coll's book addresses the usage of the funds to finance the radical groups fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan, however, not much hard information is offered to show exactly who siphoned money to Bin Laden and how much was diverted to his groups(s). The unspoken assumption is that Pakistan's intelligence service, (ISI) was responsible for this diversion. In addition, it seems the author implies the US did not really know which groups were receiving US funds. This is a murky subject area which further research would clarify and make accessible to the American people.

I recommend this book to those interested in this sordid and ironic period of US history. The book is long but well worth the read, since it will impart much enlightenment about CIA behavior and the reader will be armed with a better understanding of what must be done to avoid this kind of catastrophe again.

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5.0 out of 5 stars Requiem for a Lion, Oct 20 2008
By 
Jack Blatant (Ontario, Canada) - See all my reviews
(TOP 500 REVIEWER)   
This review is from: Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001 (Paperback)
I've never had the strongest opinion of the intellectual capabilities of Osama Bin Laden, but the events which Coll describes have made me reconsider my opinion. If, as it seems clear, the murder of Ahmed Shah Massoud was intended to coincide with the attacks upon the World Trade Centre towers, it was a stroke of evil genius: bin Laden removing the one man who would stand a chance of guiding the Americans to him even as bin Laden made himself the number one target of the United States. The relationship between Afghanistan and the West is longer and more complex than one book could ever encompass, but Coll does a fantastic job in providing the recent picture.

9/11 has come and gone, and here we are, still in Afghanistan. For years, Brezinski crowed about luring the Soviets into "the Afghan trap." This book clearly explains how the rest of the world has paid the price for this.
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
3.0 out of 5 stars The CIA had too much information, and so does this book., April 20 2004
By A Customer
This review is from: Ghost Wars (Hardcover)
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.

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