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

I had the opportunity today (well, yesterday now, but who's really keeping track of such things?) to go see The Bourne Legacy with my mom.  It was fairly enjoyable, and I wish I had time to write up a proper review.  The movie did remind me that I had a review sitting about, almost completed, that I ought to take time to finish.  Not my best review, after a brief editing sesion, but it'll do.  But this one was a good book, and I'd feel remiss if I didn't take a moment to upload my thoughts on it.

Source: Amazon.com

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

From the book’s cover:

From the managing editor of the Washington Post, a news-breaking account of the CIA's involvement in the covert wars in Afghanistan that fueled Islamic militancy and gave rise to bin Laden's al Qaeda.
For nearly the past quarter century, while most Americans were unaware, Afghanistan has been the playing field for intense covert operations by U.S. and foreign intelligence agencies-invisible wars which sowed the seeds of the September 11 attacks and which provide its context. From the Soviet invasion in 1979 through the summer of 2001, the CIA, KGB, Pakistan's ISI, and Saudi Arabia's General Intelligence Department all operated directly and secretly in Afghanistan. They primed Afghan factions with cash and weapons, secretly trained guerrilla forces, funded propaganda, and manipulated politics. In the midst of these struggles bin Laden conceived and then built his global organization.
Comprehensively and for the first time, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Steve Coll tells the secret history of the CIA's role in Afghanistan, from its covert program against Soviet troops from 1979 to 1989, to the rise of the Taliban and the emergence of bin Laden, to the secret efforts by CIA officers and their agents to capture or kill bin Laden in Afghanistan after 1998. Based on extensive firsthand accounts, Ghost Warsok is the inside story that goes well beyond anything previously published on U.S. involvement in Afghanistan. It chronicles the roles of midlevel CIA officers, their Afghan allies, and top spy masters such as Bill Casey, Saudi Arabia's Prince Turki al Faisal, and George Tenet. And it describes heated debates within the American government and the often poisonous, mistrustful relations between the CIA and foreign intelligence agencies.
Ghost Wars answers the questions so many have asked since the horrors of September 11: To what extent did America's best intelligence analysts grasp the rising threat of Islamist radicalism? Who tried to stop bin Laden and why did they fail?


Synopsis:

Ghost Wars covers the period of time between the days immediately prior to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1980 up to the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon and the crash landing of Flight 93 in Pennsylvania on September 11, 2001.  The book is split into three distinct sections, each covering a period of time in that span.  There is the nearly ten year period of the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, the early-to-mid 1990s (in which the Afghan Civil War began in earnest and the budding Near-East Terrorist organizations really got rolling), and then the late 90s and early 2000s.  This latter period was quite fascinating, as it described the number of terror attacks and the ominous rumblings of planned terror attacks that the U.S. and its allies faced before the “big one” of 9/11.

The author has made a fairly exhaustive study of the events leading up to America’s worst terrorist incident in its history (largely thanks to the 9/11 Commision, as he himself points out in the final concluding paragraphs of the text).  There is a wealth of detail on the war the Soviets fought in support of their puppet state Communist regime in Afghanistan, the rise of non-state affiliated terror groups, the prominence and eventual downfall to radical Political Islamic orientation of Osama Bin Laden, and the United State’s efforts at preventing the sort of disaster that 9/11 represented in the years before it occurred.  

Ghost Wars is nothing if not thorough. There is quite a lot of material on the different major participants in the struggle for control of Afghanistan, the politics between Pakistan and Afghanistan that always played a huge role in how the outside world was able to interact with the Afghan resistance during the war, as well as the variety of warring factions left to scrap over Afghanistan after the Russians withdrew in late 1988 up through early 1989.  There is data on the efforts of the CIA and the FBI as they worked, often at cross purposes, to counter threats to the United States on the international stage.  There are the Administrations of Reagan, Bush Sr., Clinton, and the early days of the George W Bush as well, including many insights into each president’s handling of the terrorism question.  There is even an in-depth analysis of the genesis of the Predator drone program, which came about due to the CIA’s desire to have an unmanned spy aircraft that could be used to pass along near real-time reconnaissance data to the military for Tomahawk cruise missile attacks on high value targets, such as a particular farm that Osama Bin Laden frequented and kept members of his family at.

Speaking of Bin Laden, the former Saudi terror organizer and sponsor was a major topic of the book. This would seem a given, if we think of Bin Laden’s ties to the events of 9/11, but the book sheds so much light on all the terrorism-related happenings during the 90s that it might be easy to lose sight of Bin Laden’s role in the shaping of matters.  We see how Bin Laden went from well-off but rather pedestrian roots as the son of a major construction contractor, to being the U.S.’s most wanted man after 9/11.  And we see how the Taliban was involved, something which I must confess I never fully understood when the United States invaded Afghanistan in 2001/2002 after the terrorist attacks.

To give a full and informed synopsis of Ghost Wars would take more time and effort than is really called for, but suffice it to say, this book is a very thorough study of the events that led the United States from a state of Cold War with the Soviet Empire in South-West Asia to a period of full out “War on Terror” in the mid 2000s.


The author, Steve Coll / Source: RaymondPronk.Wordpress.com

 What I liked about it:

As my synopsis indicated, the book is quite exhaustive in the research it presents.  The author appears to have really done his homework, as the saying goes.  I liked how the author used a  multi-faceted approach to the overall question of Middle East terror cell growth through the 80s and 90.  The subject was handled in a very thorough manner.  Coll brings in so many aspects of the issue that it can actually be tough to keep things straight in your head from time to time.

Some of the chapters really pulled me in, while others were less effective, if still overall informative.  The stuff on the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan was really fascinating to me, for obvious reasons to anyone who has read any of my reviews that mention the Soviet Union.  I am an admitted novice historian of the Soviet Union and the Russian people.  So the descriptions of the Soviet side of the issue that Coll brings in was quite good.  Also the way the Russians and the Afghans clashed made for gripping, if somewhat barbaric content.  The Afghans would kill the Soviet troops in really horrible ways, and yet were reported to be non-aggressive toward civilians, while the Soviets, on the other hand, were quite brutal and committed numerous atrocities.

The material on the inner workings of the government ministries of the Saudis, the U.S., the Afghans (specifically the various factions of the civil war that followed the Soviet withrawl), and the Pakistanis was also great.  The way the Pakistanis monopolized Afghanistan and used their influence to control aid to that nation, both during the Soviet occupation and afterward, is fascinating and scary at the same time.  The regime that came and went throughout the time period covered is also eye-opening to someone who hadn’t paid much attention to Pakistani internal politics before.  The book describes a specific instance where the president of Pakistan’s plane went down in the mountains with a U.S. diplomat onboard (I forget the man’s rank, but it may have been the U.S. ambassador to Pakistan) was especially interesting.  Talk about a potential goat rope for U.S.-Pakistani relations.!

Overall, I’d have to say that I liked most of the book, and found it interesting and worth the time and effort invested.  The book covered a wide spectrum of topics relating to the road to 9/11, and did it in such a way that a non-academic could handle it, though it wasn’t always easy reading, to be sure.  And most of all, it gave me a new perspective on the events of September 11th, but I’ll say more about that in a moment.

What I didn’t like about it:

My gripe about the book that is not clear and memorable may have been an error on the part of the person reading it, and is not a big issue in the grand scheme of things.  In several places in the book, the author refers to Soviet aircraft by their name or designation nomenclature.  The designation nomenclature is good overall, but in the places where the author refers to the Soviet helicopters, the narrator would call them “Mig” instead of “Mil.”  At first I thought I was just hearing it wrong, but over time I noticed for certain that the error was in his pronunciation and was distinct.  I know I’m nitpicking, but all I can say is that the book was good enough that this was one of the only glaring mistakes I noticed personally.  

For the record, Mikoyan - previously known as Mikoyan and Gurevich prior to changes it underwent shortly after the fall of Communism in the early 90s (aka: “MiG” in Soviet military parlance) - is a manufacturer of aircraft, primarily fighter planes.  Mil (aka “Mi” in its Soviet abbreviation) is a manufacturer of Soviet and now Russian helicopters.  The two organizations are quite distinct and should not be interchanged.  I can only hope the author got the names right and the guy narrating the audiobook was the fault, though his pronunciation of Russian names and other details was pretty good to my layman ear otherwise.

The only other vague gripe I might offer would be that the book was at times too thorough, but this is neither here nor there in the long term.  Better too well researched and carefully crafted than shoddily put together, in my opinion.  So I’d say that was only a complaint when the details got a bit overwhelming for even my interest level, which on this subject matter is quite high.




The book describes how Osama Bin Laden had a rather "normal" childhood, and only in later years became the complete so-caled "fundamentalist" ultra-conservative wacko that ended with his death at the hands of U.S. special forces in 2011. / Source: BorrowedCulture.com


What I learned, if anything:

I will sum up what I learned in a few quick statements.  First,  I gained a greater appreciation for the conflict in Afghanistan.  And then I also learned more about the politics involved in U.S.-Saudi relations, as ultra-conservative Saudis were (and still are, I suppose) one of the biggest threats to U.S interests in the region due to their militant approach toward “the decadent West.”

I learned a lot about how the CIA and the FBI went about prosecuting the war before the War on Terror - the undeclared war of a thousand pin pricks that led up to September 11, 2001.  This may be the most significant thing I gained from reading Ghost Wars.  It was not a question of IF we’d get hit by an state-independent terror organization, it was a question of WHEN.  The number of incidents the U.S. Intelligence community was tracking on during the 1990s is staggering, and the number of people who lost their lives prior to 9/11 in foreign-sponsored terrorist orchestrated attacks is sobering.

I can’t say that I agree with the U.S.’s approach to the aftermath of September 11th, but I recognize that it is easy for me and others to “armchair quarterback” it.  The position the book gives is that the U.S. forces tasked with stopping an attack of the sort that September 11 amounted to were doing what they could in a rapidly escalating maelstrom.  I can’t recall the exact analogy that one of the guys from the U.S. Intelligence community gave, but it was something to the effect that they were playing a game of chess and trying to capture their opponent’s King without ever touching their own pawns.  the failures in the system that led to the tragedy of 9/11 are inexcusable, and seem even more so after having read the book’s finding, but in the long run, it would have happened sooner or later.  Having read the reports that Coll has collected in his book, we were a big fat turkey with a bulls-eye painted on it, and sooner or later one of these determined terror groups was bound to get us in some big and bad way.  

Recommendation:

I enjoyed the book very much, as I have tried to indicate in this review.  Despite being somewhat wordy and frustratingly complex in segments, the overall document is full of fascinating and informative material.  I thought it was really worth my time spent, and would recommend to anyone who wants to learn more about the road leading to the disaster that befell the United States on September 11, 2001.
Learn more about Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001 on Amazon.com

The parting comment:


Source: henkkahamalainen.posterous.com



This one refers to the aforementioned Bourne movie that I got to see today.  No, there is no amnesia in this new one, but there is some shady pharmacopia-related shannanigans (remind me to blog about my adventures with the psuedo-term "Pharmacopia") and best of all, the big bad guy of the movie's climax gets his ass handed to him by the film's heroine, and not our Bounre wannabe.  That alone was worth the price of admission (well, not really, as movie prices are so high these days, but I'm rambling now and so I'll shut up).