Directorate S: The C.I.A. and America’s Secret Wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan

Previous to 9/11, america had been finishing up small-scale covert operations in Afghanistan, ostensibly in cooperation, though typically in direct opposition, with I.S.I., the Pakistani intelligence company. Whereas the US was attempting to quell extremists, a extremely secretive and compartmentalized wing of I.S.I., generally known as “Directorate S,” was covertly coaching, arming, and looking for to legitimize the Taliban, in an effort to enlarge Pakistan’s sphere of affect. After 9/11, when fifty-nine nations, led by the U. S., deployed troops or supplied assist to Afghanistan in an effort to flush out the Taliban and Al Qaeda, the U.S. was set on an invisible slow-motion collision course with Pakistan.

In the present day we all know that the warfare in Afghanistan would falter badly due to navy hubris on the highest ranges of the Pentagon, the drain on sources and provocation within the Muslim world brought on by the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, and corruption. However greater than something, as Coll makes painfully clear, the warfare in Afghanistan was doomed due to the failure of america to apprehend the motivations and intentions of I.S.I.’s “Directorate S”. This was a swirling and shadowy battle of historic proportions, which endured over a decade and throughout each the Bush and Obama administrations, involving a number of secret intelligence businesses, a litany of incongruous methods and techniques, and dozens of gamers, together with a few of the most outstanding navy and political figures. A sprawling American tragedy, the warfare was an open conflict of arms but in addition a covert melee of concepts, secrets and techniques, and subterranean violence.

Coll excavates this grand battle, which passed off away from the gaze of the American public. With unsurpassed experience, authentic analysis, and a spotlight to element, he brings to life a story without delay huge and complicated, native and international, propulsive and painstaking.

That is the definitive rationalization of how America got here to be so badly ensnared in an elaborate, factional, and seemingly interminable battle in South Asia. Nothing lower than a forensic examination of the non-public and political forces that form world historical past,
Directorate S is a whole masterpiece of each investigative and narrative journalism.