Customer Reviews

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

5 star:		(145)
4 star:		(33)
3 star:		(19)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(6)

 

 

"Afghanistanism" used to be a derisive term in the newspaper world. It meant playing up news from obscure far-off places while neglecting what was going wrong on your own home turf.

No longer. Very few countries worldwide have been more important to the U.S. over the past quarter century than this remote, primitive, landlocked and little-understood area tucked in between Iran, Pakistan and the former U.S.S.R. In this weighty and immensely detailed book, Steve Coll, who reported from Afghanistan for the Washington Post (where he is now managing editor) between 1989 and 1992, sorts out for the patient reader one of the most complex diplomatic and military involvements the U.S. has experienced in this century.

The cast of characters is immense, rivaling for sheer size (and personal quirkiness) any novel by Dickens or Dostoyevsky. It ranges from four U.S. Presidents through a platoon of bemedaled generals from five or six countries and a regiment of scheming diplomats down to hard-pressed pilots, miserably ill-equipped guerilla fighters, steely-eyed assassins and suicide bombers. There are more political factions here than most readers will be able to keep track of --- not to mention the factions that spring up within factions. It is all quite dizzying, but also fascinating and important.

Coll is a conscientious reporter. He does his best to keep the reader informed and to make his more important players come alive as human beings. His book is not easy reading, but it rewards well anyone who buckles down and stays with it to the end.

A couple of general impressions: First, Coll demonstrates time and again how much of the really important things that government --- any government --- does in foreign relations is done in deep secrecy, far from the eyes and ears of the average consumer of "news." Secondly, he leaves the impression that disdain and hatred of non-Muslims is pretty much pervasive throughout the Muslim world, coloring the actions and judgments even of those Muslims whom westerners might not consider "extremists."

Another leitmotiv in this almost Wagnerian epic drama is a pervasive lack of interest on the part of American policymakers in the developing crisis in Afghanistan, followed by paralyzing intra-agency squabbles and turf battles once the threat of terrorism became unavoidable. One is reminded of Dickens's satirical governmental invention, the "Circumlocution Office" in Little Dorrit with its famous motto: How Not To Do It.

Coll covers in exhaustive detail the defeat and withdrawal of the Soviet Union; the factional warfare that ensued; the rise of the Taliban from a small cadre of student zealots to a force that ruled most of the country; the emergence of Osama bin Laden; the clumsy and ineffective efforts of the U.S. government to get meaningful cooperation from Saudi Arabia and/or Pakistan in stabilizing and democratizing the region; and the ominous events that led up to --- but did not precisely signal -- the attacks of Sept. 11th. He is especially good on the lack of interest and decisive action by the U.S. after the Russian withdrawal and on the paralyzing rivalries between competing governmental spook shops that caused this breakdown. Action plans would be developed, only to be derailed by fruitless internal debates and objections. "How Not To Do It" indeed!

An additional strength of the book is Coll's knack for thumbnail portraits of the participants. Most memorable are his word pictures of two CIA directors: the religiously driven cold warrior William Casey and the consummate organization man George Tenet. Also well done are his portraits of Afghan warriors like the unlucky Ahmed Shah Massoud (whose assassination closes the book) and Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. Osama bin Laden himself, though dutifully described, remains necessarily an offstage influence rather than a full-bodied presence. Both Pakistan and Saudi Arabia come off in Coll's pages as unreliable allies, to the point of being deceitful in their dealings with the U.S.

GHOST WARS is not beach reading by any means, but those who have the patience to get through it will emerge well informed indeed. Of course, everything changed on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001. Can a second volume be far behind?

--- Reviewed by Robert Finn

Coll provides a highly detailed, well written account of the history of the CIA and United States in Afghanistan from the Soviet invasion to 9/11. I highly recommend this work for anyone who is interested in how we came to the point we are in Afghanistan post-9/11, and how we inadvertently provided Bin Laden fertile ground for a successful terrorist operation.


Frankly, after reading this account, I became empathetic toward the CIA, Clinton and those in his administration, and the Pakistani and Saudi governments. Clearly their positions and actions lead to the rise of the Taliban. While lots of mistakes and maybe some shortsightedness existed among these players, they were all dealing with intricate and sensitive internal political issues that drove their decisions, or in the case of the United States, lack of action, in post-Soviet Afghanistan.

While Bin Laden would likely have existed without the safe haven he found in Afghanistan, his ability to train and draw followers so freely and with impunity is partially "blowback" from actions taken by the CIA, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia during the Soviet-Afghan war as money and weapons poured into the country.

There is also quite a bit of information about Ahmed Massoud, leader of the Northern Alliance. It's interesting to speculate how more assistance to Massoud might have thwarted or overthrown the Taliban and as a result push Bin Laden into less favorable circumstances. But given Massoud's failure as a political leader in his first opportunity, the brutality of his troops, and being an ethnic minority in his country, again one can empathize with why the United States was reluctant to pin their hopes on him.

If you are trying to decide which of the very large number of books about Afghanistan, the Taliban, and Bin Laden are worth reading, this is one of them.

Edit of 20 Dec 07 to add links including books since published.

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 How the Wildest Man in Congress and a Rogue CIA Agent Changed the History of Our Times 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 naiveté 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 Bin Laden: The Man Who Declared War on America 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.

Other books that augment this one:
The Looming Tower: Al Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 (Vintage)
Web of Deceit: The History of Western Complicity in Iraq, from Churchill to Kennedy to George W. Bush
Jawbreaker: The Attack on Bin Laden and Al-Qaeda: A Personal Account by the CIA's Key Field Commander
First In: An Insider's Account of How the CIA Spearheaded the War on Terror in Afghanistan
See No Evil: The True Story of a Ground Soldier in the CIA's War on Terrorism
Sleeping with the Devil: How Washington Sold Our Soul for Saudi Crude
Crossing the Rubicon: The Decline of the American Empire at the End of the Age of Oil

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 naiveté 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.

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 naiveté 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.

I have to say that Ghost Wars is probably one of the most ambitious books I've ever read in terms of scope. Coll covers the period from the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan to September 10, 2001. International terrorism, the Russo-Afghan war, US-Pakistan relations have had whole books dedicated to these specific topics, so I was a little concerned how that would shake out in a single text. To his credit, Coll pulls it off for the most part. However, there is just such a glut of information that the reader will find himself at times overwhelmed when the book goes into new or unfamiliar topics. It's like reading the encyclopedia at times, which is both compliment and a criticism.

I picked up Ghost Wars for insight on the history that led up to September 11, 2001. I learned much more than I was expecting to, and Coll does a good job of sprinkling historical back-stories when necessary. The founding of Saudi Arabi and the brief biography of CIA's William Casey are two good examples. Bin Laden also becomes more than a terrorist mastermind here, and at times I felt I almost gained a little insight to who this guy is and his life. Some would say that knowing these circumstances partially excuse him, but make no mistake: this book's purpose is not to excuse, but to inform. Amazingly, bin Laden faced an assasination attempt by fellow Muslims because he wasn't 'devout enough'. Incredible.

Ghost Wars is a great pre-9/11 history of a complicated, murky and convoluted topic. One who reads this book will be not be surprised any longer by any stories the media releases as new on this topic. Also valuable are the questions this book puts to rest, or at least tries to put to rest. Did we arm bin Laden? How much did we really help to the formation of al-Quada? The answers will surprise most, and will probably end up disappointing those who believe America can do no wrong and those who believe America can do no right.

While the 9/11 commission attempts to spread the blame for the US attacks across two administrations, Ghost Wars clearly underlines how the world we live in today was forged by so many ambitious, well-intentioned (but incredibly myopic) cold warriors from the 70's and 80's. To get an even better perspective, readers should tackle Leebaert's "The Fifty Year Wound" (another massive tome unfortunately) in advance. The two volumes certainly compliment each other and bridge some obvious gaps.

I was a little perplexed by some of the previous reviewer's comments regarding the need for additional editing. Unlike Leebaert's volume (which I agree could have been gone over a couple more times), Ghost Wars read like a thriller. I ripped through this book in a couple of days. I can't recall a single chapter that did not hold my attention thoroughly. I actually enjoyed the "inside the Beltway " elements - they helped to humanize what might otherwise make for dry historical reading.

Wow, I could not put this book down, It was so interesting and enthraling. If you want to know how our intelligence agencies opererate, from our spies on the ground to the budgetary procudures, this is all you need. Steve Coll is an amazing unbiased reporter that lets the reader draw his own conclusions, in many ways he just provides the facts. It starts with the soviet-afghan war, and our clear agenda to help the afgans bleed the soviets. But with the collapse of the soviet union, they United States simply did not seem to care much about afghanistan, nor did it want to get involved in its politics, much to the behest of many career mid to lower level intelligence and diplomatic professionals. IT simply did not seem as important as defining what the post cold war world would look like, Inter agency rivalries, oil contracts, reluctance to use covert ops, mistrust of the CIA outright by clinton, and legal issues regarding killing OBL all got in the way. To make things worse during the 1990's the corporate "silicon valley" cluture somehow managed to find its way to the CIA, infecting it with a deadly mix of political correctness in everything from its operations to hiring, this in turn drove many of the CIA's longtime operatives to go into early retirement. At one point, the CIA was adding little more than 1 new operative in a span of a few months.
Coll spends the latter half of the book describing how the CIA and the CTSG tried in vain to kill Osama Bin Laden but were shot down by senior politicians and even the pentagon, who simply did not want to get involved. I overwhelmingly enjoyed this book, if you are remotely interested in the nuts and bolts of US foreign policy, this will provide a great look into its innner wheelings and dealings.
There are a few items that Coll does leave out. The biggest issue is pakistans nuclear weapons, he never really discusses them, It would have been great to see what Coll could have dug up if he put his journalistic powers to work on this issue, did pakistani nuclear weapons scientists in conjunction with the Pakistani ISI who were in bed with OBL and the Taliban give nuclear material to them? Second, it is not always clear when CIA agents were directly involved in operations in afghanistan. It always appears murky, and one could go as far to say they were on the ground constantly secretly helping massoud, it would be great for this matter to be cleared up. Go out and buy this book right away...

One of this book's biggest liabilities, oddly enough, is the depth and density of detail it provides. The information is all there, but the names and places and events come so fast it's like trying to drink from a firehose. To make things even more challenging, the relationships between the principal entities keep shifting, with allies in one chapter at each other's throats in the next. Though it's a weighty enough tome already, it would have helped a lot to have one-paragraph descriptions of the principals in an appendix. A timeline or two would have been helpful as well, to illustrate the context in which these events played out.

But then, we should wish that all books have such problems. If you read this book, you will have an understanding of Afghanistan that was previously limited to a handful of specialists before. You will have all the ammunition you need to win just about any informal debate regarding this country so often visited by great misfortune throughout its history, regardless of where you stand politically. One of the book's greatest strength is how it sticks to the facts and lets you make your own decisions about who the heroes (very few) and villains (very many) are. The many mistakes of presidents from Reagan through Bush II are detailed unsparingly, as are the unseemly political maneuvering between governments and government departments while lives hang in the balance.

It can be very depressing at times, reading the book, to see how often principle gave way to expediency, or how the more malevolent players were able to recognize and exploit that pattern time and time again. Our enemies understood us far, far better than we understood them, and used that understanding to outmaneuver us. They're still doing it. Our only hope of reversing that trend is to learn how the game is really being played, and Coll's accounts are invaluable in that regard.

. . . and I thought Bob Woodward had inside sources.

"Ghost Wars" is a fresh, detailed, and fascinating assessment of the United States' experience with Afghanistan from 1979 to the eve of 9/11/2001. The axes upon Coll bases his discussion are all in the sub-title: Afghanistan, the CIA, and Osama Bin Laden. Coll's recounting of this twenty year saga goes far to explain the roots and development of the United States's inability to deter the danger that became so graphically evident the day after this book's narrative ends. Taking the trip with Mr. Coll is well worth the effort.

Yes, the book is detailed, but it would be a disservice to back away from the intricacies of the story -- just as it has proven to be a mistake for the United States to have backed away from the complexities of Afghanistan once the Soviets withdrew.

Coll's discussion illustrates just how difficult a task it is to deal with the tapestry of agendas that both divide and bind the Middle East from Egypt to India. While one might wish to disengage from such interwoven complexities, the risk of ignoring a failing state such as Afghanistan is to allow the creation of a untamed country in which an extreme regime such as the Taliban and a group as dangerous as that sponsored by Osama bin Laden can take root and thrive.

There are a host of issues to be derived from this history. One of the greatest is the question of how the United States can ever deal with its constantly-changing, yet essential agenda. It is always huge. In hindsight, it is easy to condemn successive administrations for failing to pay attention to issues that later develop into crises. At the same time, a president such as Bush 41 may encounter other priorities such as the break-up of the Soviet Union or an invasion of Kuwait. Once a story falls off the front page, attention shifts elsewhere.

As Coll illustrates, great risks can arise from the recurrent attention-deficit disorder of the focus of U.S. foreign policy. That risk is only compounded when the government tacks and gibes in response to political winds. It's devilishly hard to keep one's eye on the ball when the game itself keeps changing.

Unlike a Tom Clancy novel, "Ghost Wars" shows that the good guys don't always win. The unfolding of actual events carries no guarantees. The government may be paralyzed by imperfect information and irreconcilable agendas both within and outside its agencies. If there is one sweeping lesson to be derived from this story, it is that the U.S. needs a far more varied and nuanced approach to the world, one that is not so reliant upon military predominance, but rather one that relies upon the collection of good intelligence, thorough analysis, careful diplomacy, and, yes, when needed, covert action.

I sharply disagree with those who see this work as a political polemic. Coll's recounting of events carries plenty of blame (if that is the right word) for a succession of failures that can be attributed to a succession of agencies, politicians, and presidents alike. A system which embraces an ever-changing focus driven by political imperatives is the risk -- not necessarily the individuals or their politics.

I do wish that Coll had carried through with an epilogue to shed light on the events in Afghanistan of the past two to three years and the relationship of the U.S. to that sad country today. The story ends rather abruptly with the assassination of Massoud on September 9. I know Coll has more to say about how the United States' response to 9/11 in Afghanistan has affected our relations with Pakistan and Saudi Arabia.