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

According to General Sir Frank Kitson, "Insurgents start with nothing but a cause and grow to strength, while the counter-insurgents start with everything but a cause and gradually decline in strength and grow to weakness" ("Low Intensity Operations: Subversion, Insurgency and Peacekeeping"). That 1971-era aphorism has repeatedly been proven correct and the US "Coalition" effort in Afghanistan demonstrates its accuracy yet again. After nearly two decades and around 1 trillion dollars spent so far, a bloody and very tenuous equilibrium exists between Taliban insurgents and supporters of the Afghan government. The war from its inception to the present time is comprehensively researched and compellingly presented in Steve Coll's two books, "Ghost Wars" and "Directorate S". Unfortunately, with no end to the conflict in sight, a third volume may eventually be needed to update the story.Despite the narrow focus implied by the title, "Directorate S" does not focus either exclusively nor primarily on that branch of Pakistan's Inter Services Intelligence Directorate (ISI). The CIA was the focus of "Ghost Wars". The much more obscure Pakistani analogue, ISI Directorate S (charged - at least in part - with providing guidance, logistic, intelligence, material and occasionally directed support for Islamist insurgent/terrorist groups operating against Indian influence and Coalition forces in Afghanistan) has a background – but baleful - position in "Directorate S".Coll's history begins where "Ghost Wars" left off, i.e., the conclusion of the 1979-1989 battle of Afghani and allied Islamist groups against the Soviet Union. The USSR was defeated by CIA and Saudi supported insurgents. This occurred despite “all out” efforts by a modern and generally ruthless military directed against a “ragtag” constellation of tribes lacking an air force, armored vehicles and other accouterments possessed by the Red Army. The Soviet defeat ought to have been an object lesson for successors, but it wasn’t.Of course, the inevitability of dramatic and overwhelming US action against al Qaeda and its Taliban hosts after September 11 was obvious and perhaps justifiable at the time. What wasn’t thought out though was the consequence of military action, that being a long-term and interminable involvement in a conflict that would result in (at the very best) a costly and unsustainable stalemate. Pham Van Dong, (North Vietnamese premier and Ho Chi Minh’s close aide and successor) presciently commented to French war historian Bernard Fall in 1962, “Americans do not like long, inconclusive wars—and this is going to be a long, inconclusive war" and that was 3 years before we ramped up involvement.If, as Henry Kissinger remarked, "The test of policy is how it ends, not how it begins" (Washington Post, March, 2014), we've failed utterly and completely in Afghanistan. As even a casual reading of counterinsurgency literature shows, the prospect of prevailing against an insurgency in territory adjoining a supportive state approximates zero. A quick glance at a map shows such a state (Pakistan) and a cursory glance at any news source reported since about 1947 gives insight into the ineradicable antagonism (religious, geostrategic) between Muslim Pakistan and Hindu India. Afghanistan isn't known as "The Graveyard of Empires" for nothing. The debacles outsiders suffered there are well known and the stuff of legends and fiction. Consider George MacDonald Fraser's anti-hero Harry Paget Flashman's adventures in the First Anglo-Afghan War. While our military leadership isn't as inept as that of Major-General William George Keith Elphinstone (whose disastrous retreat from Kabul harkens to Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow) and we've yet to suffer other ignominies of First Anglo-Afghan War such as the Last Stand at the Battle of Gandamak and the Siege of Jalalabad, we aren't winning, either.“Directorate S” details all the problems associated with porous borders, semi-autonomous (i.e., largely ungoverned) tribal regions, endemic corruption of historical proportions (the Karzai government), warlords, weak central government lacking legitimacy (parallels between Karzai and Diem in Vietnam come to mind?), opium, factionalism (in the US, Pakistan, Afghanistan), conflicting priorities (the Petraeus school v the Abizaid approach), lack of a coordinated strategy (CIA v. DEA v. JSOC, etc., etc), heavy-handed tactics (drone strikes killing civilians), the always inimical influence of religion (especially militant Islam) and competing/conflicting interests of India, Pakistan, Iran. A particularly ill-advised decision was made with the US invasion of Iraq.The real irony of our involvement in Afghanistan is this: “Pakistan is 50 times more important than Afghanistan for the United States”, a candid remark made directly to President Hamid Karzi in the Arg Palace by Vice President Joe Biden. Karzai had repeatedly warned of ISI/Directorate S involvement in his country and the Americans were already well aware of it. We knew that ISI was directly and indirectly responsible for the deaths of many Americans and the Taliban likely wouldn’t be effective absent Pakistan’s support. In short, we knew we were facing rats in Pakistan’s ISI: “Pakrats” and there was precious little we could do about it.Sooner or later, the “endless money that forms the sinews of war” (per Cicero) from the US and Coalition forces will end. The casualties will exhaust us. We will leave. Whether India will allow Pakistani suzerainty in Afghanistan is anybody’s guess. As Steve Coll so well demonstrates, a major contributor to whatever happens next is Directorate S, “Pakrats” indeed and in fact.

Things I knew before reading this book:1. Afghanistan will never be a liberal, Western-style democracy.2. Afghanistan will return to Taliban rule, or at least a very austere, Taliban-like government.3. Women's rights will be rolled back, if not utterly extinguished (sorry 3 Cups of Tea guy!)4. Original, very concrete US objective - kill Bin-Laden, punish Taliban for harboring him - bloomed into fantasies of establishing a liberal, Western-style democracy. Typical US mission creep, the product of: imperial arrogance, MIC business interests, the inherent need of bureaucratic agencies (and their hard-working, busybody employees) to justify their existence by maximizing their involvement in this enterprise, and the intangible reality that people involved in important historical events are invariably pulled towards the implementation of Grand Solutions.What I learned after reading book - all of the above.This is a journalistic history, which means there is no overarching theme, no unifying element, just a series of characters and anecdotes, all strung together. About 100 pages you realize this is simply going to be a series of chronological episodes, but you keep reading because the subject matter itself - interesting as it invariably is - provides enough fuel to get you to the end. There are few suprises, nothing a person moderately interested in this subject would not already know - the Pakistanis have their own national interests and destroying the Taliban does not align with these; the Pashtun are independent tribal people and stubborn as mules and will wait out any Western army, trading lives for time; liberal internationalists believe that within all human beings on this good earth there is a liberal Canadian encased within, and it merely requires patience and chipping away at the rough exterior to reveal this person.The chapters on the US military fight from 2009-2011 - when things really deteriorated - are actually quite good, and I did learn something very interesting: that the veteran Taliban fighters could distinguish between good ol' 11B (Infantry) units versus non-combat arms units thrust into infantry roles, and felt contempt - or, less strongly, moral superiority - for the latter. This may surpise non-military readers who assume that every member of the US armed forces is equally trained and always superior to a 3rd World fighter - the performance of some US units in Afghanistan illustrated otherwise. For these excellent chapters I give it a 3rd star. Otherwise, a middling history.

This is a serious scholarly study of two national complexities supported with 37 pages of footnotes in tiny print.Overall, it's not an easy read. But conversely it's virtually pointless to try to understand regional conflicts without a close read. Studying Directorate S will not make one an overnight expert, but it will teach one to avoid others who claim to be without years of specialized training and on-site experience. Perhaps the strongest message is that no outsider can appreciate the complexities of ancient and modern tribal, ethnic, cultural, and religious rivalries, beyond a few with high security clearances and impeccable integrity.Coll doesn't do much undocumented editorializing, except for his contempt for how we stumbled into a war we could not win nor a peace we couldn't impose."No small part of N.A.T.O.'s failure to stabilize Afghanistan flowed from the disasterous decision by George W. Bush to invade Iraq in 2003. The war inflamed and mobilized deeper resistance to American counterterrorism policy and warfare in the Muslim world." (pg 664)Those seeking context--who have seen the elephant or seek more understanding of this old expression--should turn first to Chapter 26, Lives and Limbs. The book may be mostly political, but there's a human side too, described indelibly on a human scale. Best I've ever read.

ery well written and really shed a light on the difficult tri-patriate of Afghan-US-Pak relations, though its still 60% US perspective/history, 30% Afgan and only 10% Pakistan despite the title whcih implies a stronger Pakistan focus. I also found the history suprisingly well balanced between all three viewpoints though there are some issues.However one key point I ahve to point out is how badly reviewed this book is. Not in terms of quality (Most reviewers give it quite high marks) but the conclusions many reviewers draw from this. I am tired of reading about a "duplictious or decieving" Pakistan when if you read the book you simply cannot reasonably draw that conclusion. The Pakistan Army upfront warned the US that its Northern Alliance based anti-Taliban strategy won't work. The US didnt listen. The Pakistan Army warned the US to seal off Tora Bora and commit more troops as the Pak Army and Frontier Corps couldn't do so alone. The US again didn't listen. This pattern repeats itself again and again. The Pakistani Army consistently lays down its conditions for support to the Americans (Kayani 1.0, 2.0 & 3.0) and none of these conditions were to be met by the US administrations (Bush or Obama). Frankly if Pakistan publicly said it was not supporting the Taliban while privately doing so, it never hid this fact from the US. The US publicly always said it was committed to Afghanistan and Iraq wouldn't distract it...whiel doing exactly that. The real issue that seems to drive American reviewers up the wall is that they asked the Pak Army to do their bidding and Pakistan instead followed its own stated self interest instead. Thats not deception thats poor diplomacy on behalf of the US govt.One key criticism of the book itself though is its still too America centric both in terms of the costs of war and also ignoring teh evolution of how the Pak Army and public have viewed the conflict in Afghanistan even though it is alluded to in the narrative. For example some key distinct turning points in the way teh Pak public and Army have thought about the Af-War and the Taliban one can readily point to are 1) Musharraf & the Army’s popularity at the start of the conflict (2) Pre and post Lal Masjid (3) The rise of the TTP and the war in Pakistan in Waziristan (4) APS – the Pakistani 9/11 and the immense popularity of Raheel Sharif (The Pak COAS) at the time.These blind spots considerably hurt the book especially considering the title.This history also suffers (As so much of the narrative around this war does) on overly focusing on the American casualties as the only ones that matter. A long chapter in the book for example focuses on the experiences of a young American officer caught in a frustrating conflict. However what about Afghan or Pakistani combat experiences? They have suffered more casualties and seen more intense combat in this conflict. How are these Armies viewing this conflict and working in it? Showing the non-American/NATO perspective would certainly enrich this history more.I don’t want the above feedback however to sound too negative as this is a fine book that does the best job (yet) I have read of articulating plainly and simply what has/is going wrong from many sides of the conflict. The criticisms above are more because its so well written that I wished for even more.

Eight days it took me to read through this monster of a sequel to Ghost Wars.It helps, of course, that the author is discussing history here. Ghost Wars was all about the tragic mistakes that led up to Al Qaeda’s “finest hour,” the simultaneous assassination of Ahmad Shah Massoud in Afghanistan and the felling of the twin towers in September of 2001.Directorate S is about Afghani history since September 2001, told from the angle of the invading Americans. It’s 700 pages short.That the book is named after Directorate S, the section within Pakistan’s secret services (the I.S.I.) that has secretly supported the Taliban since September 11, strongly hints toward the fact that Steve Coll ultimately has enormous sympathy for Hamid Karzai’s chief argument: America and its allies may well have felt they had no alternative to invading Afghanistan after nine-eleven, but they never stood a chance of defeating the Taliban, due to the Taliban’s ability to always withdraw and regroup in the Waziristan province of Pakistan.He never says so outright, however. He tells the story as best he can. And it’s a thriller.Steve Coll mixes history, biography, politics and individual memoirs to deliver a step-by-step account of the “with us or against us” dilemma that Musharraf had to answer pretty much same-day (his Secret Services’ inability and unwillingness to deliver it and the political impossibility for Pakistan to do so notwithstanding), the immediate success of the invading NATO forces in ousting the Taliban, the establishment of the Karzai government, its failure to govern, the Obama / McChrystal / Petraeus surge, whose fate may have been sealed by its built-in sell-by date, the fiasco that were the 2009 elections for everybody involved, the WWI-style horror of the warfare to regain Helmand for no particular end-goal, the surge of green-on-blue attacks, the failure of Holbrooke’s and Hillary’s effort to bring the Taliban to the table and the eventual breakdown of the relationship between the US and its primary interlocutor in the area, the I.S.I.’s Ashfaq Kayani, who emerges as the main character of this saga.Coll never loses you. He has a five-page reference section at the front, listing the names of all the protagonists in the book. He builds them well enough for you to always know who he’s talking about. I only maybe looked at it five times as he took me through the three-dimensional chess involving the US, the Karzai government in Kabul, the Taliban leadership, the Pakistani military leadership and the Pakistani secret services, with walk-in roles for the Saudis, the Qataris, the Afghan secret service, the Pakistani political leadership, and never forgetting the soldiers, analysts and spies who fought the war in the trenches.Part of the reason you stay with him is you get the full briefing regarding where everybody’s coming from and how everybody feels about it: crazy Karzai thinks both Pakistan and the US want to replace him, his buddy (and US envoy/ambassador) Khalilzad simply cannot convince him otherwise; Pakistan sees Indian influence everywhere and can only see the Afghan struggle in the context of the threat that India will engulf it from both sides; the US is split four ways between the bullish Pentagon, the disbelieving C.I.A., the can-do / must-do White house and the hyperactive State Department. The Taliban are always there and, in stark contrast with their double-dealing Pakistani supporters, totally unwilling to show two faces, or even one, for that matter.Finally, the voice of the low-ranking participant is heard loud and clear, be it the US soldier writing back to his family, the misrepresented Panshjiri who is forced to bet on Kabul, or the Pashto-speaking peasant who must pick sides (let alone crops), all while observing the bumbling western invaders prioritizing their own safety over showing a morsel of respect for a country they purport to have saved, driving away from the scene of many an accident and occasionally using indiscriminate violence.Lest I have not made it clear, however, and much as the book is told from the American angle, the main protagonists here are the Pakistani army and the Pakistani secret services. It is in their back yard that the fight is taking place. Their support for the Taliban comes from the fact that they will need them there in Afghanistan after the Americans leave. This support is very costly, because it acts as an incubator for terrorism and violence that is primarily directed toward Pakistan itself, if perhaps more successfully toward secular Pakistan than toward people in uniform. Ultimately, however, they run a corrupt and leaky enough set of institutions that their request to be in the middle of every negotiation cannot be taken seriously, the proof being that the Americans go ahead and kill Osama bin Laden in total secrecy. If that was the straw that broke the camel’s back or merely a symptom of a broken relationship is not really a topic that makes the final cut for these 700 very dense pages.The summary of those fifteen years is given on page 664 and I don’t think one can give it any better than the author himself: “…even without Iraq or Guantanamo the United States would have struggled to achieve many of its goals in Afghanistan. Primarily this was because two administrations led by presidents of different political parties could not resolve essential questions about the conflict. Did they truly believe that Afghanistan’s independence and stability was more important than Pakistan’s stability? Why did they accept I.S.I.’s support for the Taliban even when it directly undermined American interests and American lives? If they were to try to stop I.S.I.’s cover action, what risks were they prepared to take? Inside Afghanistan, which was more important: to work with unsavory but sometimes effective warlords and militias against Al Qaeda and the Taliban, or to promote decent government, even if the attempt to do so created instability? How important was drug enforcement, if the anti-drug campaign risked alienating farmers and laborers in Taliban country? The Taliban might be abhorrent, but did the movement pose a direct threat to the United States? If the Afghan war could be settled only by peace talks that included as much of the Taliban as possible, as many at the highest levels of the Obama administration came to believe after 2010, why was this daunting project left to a secret cell of negotiators and not made a higher, more explicit priority of the United States, as were the comparably risky negotiations with Iran and Cuba undertaken during Obama’s second term?And that’s Steve Coll’s long epitaph for a struggle America was forced into without having even worked out its own motivations, let alone the potential consequences.It’s dynamite.

if there was a 6 out of 5 I would tick that - I worked in Afghanistan from 2005 until 2013 - this book fills in all the blanks - the details behind what we knew and what our Afghan colleagues told us - but which the world did not want to admit - until revealed in this book - excellent read - amazing fact finding and research - the best summary of what really went on in Afg/Pak - so greatful to have access to such extraordinary insights, facts and ground truths at such snr levels

Curiously disappointing and disjointed book. For a start, the author never really investigates nor gets to the bottom of the mysterious Directorate S: if it is so secret and so little information about it exists, then why use it as the book title? Maybe it is difficult to get to the bottom of Directorate S, its existence and role - and that investigation in itself would have made for interesting reading, which the author does not cover.The book is really about the triangular relationship between the US, Afghanistan and Pakistan and is at its best in the way the US continuously had to juggle the different actors involved, especially the relations between Karzai and Kayani. Some well-trodden ground, such as the finding of Bin Laden and his assassination is described well, with further good background material on the roles of the different, competing US agencies and how the US never seems to learn how to have joined-up thinking.Given its 680 odd pages, the book is sadly short of analysis and summary, apart from a few pages in the final chapter, which could have been lengthier and more detailed. There are some excellent parts, such as the role of undercover US agents in trying to secure a peace deal with the Taliban and the investigations into why Afghan soldiers turned to kill ISAF troops, and these bits make the book worthwhile, whilst other parts are a slog.The book describes itself as covering the period 2001-2016 - the last 5 years covered are somewhat sketchily and hurriedly dealt with in the final 100 pages, which also add to the book having a disjointed feel.

This, to me, is like a history lesson of the Afghan war after 9/11, where quite a large number of nations had their fingers in the pie. Not unexpectedly, USA featured prominently being the most powerful nation, economically and militarily on earth and with a vested interest due to the unfortunate 9/11 incident.There were stories of:1. Bureaucracy, infighting and sometimes disorientated thinking among departments of the USA and Afghanistan2. Bullying, coercion, bribery and corruption3. Sometimes justified paranoia between Pakistan, India and Afghanistan4. Sometimes subtle and sometimes overt Pakistan involvement in Afghan affairs to maintain its own strategic importance and stability in the region.5. Apparent futility of military might when fighting deep rooted religious ideology6. Innocent lives needlessly lostI was glad I completed reading the book, but felt despondent that there did not appear to be a real workable solution in sight at least in the near future. The world is now so small with fast travel and instant communication that a conflict thousands of miles away has unfortunate ripple effect for the whole globe.I will be going further back in history by reading the Ghost Wars