Directorate S: The C.I.A. and America's Secret Wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan Hardcover – February 6, 2018

This is an interesting, and very lengthy, account of C.I.A. activities in Pakistan and Afghanistan. It also details their cooperation with I.S.I., Pakistan’s main spy agency. One of the purposes of the book is to address questions about how worthwhile this invasion has been and “why the seemingly successful lightning-strike American-led war of late 2001 had failed to vanquish the Taliban and Al Qaeda for good.” It picks up where volume one, Ghost Wars, ended – September 10, 2001. The author’s purpose is to also provide “a reliable history of how the C.I.A., I.S.I., and Afghan intelligence agencies influenced the rise of a new war in Afghanistan after the fall of the Taliban, and how that war fostered a revival of Al Qaeda, allied terrorist networks, and, eventually, branches of the Islamic State.”We learn that the region’s endless conflicts are not innate to its history. It is actually an outgrowth of specific misrule and violent interventions. The author lists political maneuvering, hubristic assumptions, intelligence operations, and secret diplomacy at the highest levels in Kabul, Islamabad, and Washington. All of these are contributing factors that have led us to what we see today in Afghanistan.Part One covers the start of the war in 2001. He calls it “blind into battle.” Buried in the bureaucracy of the I.S.I. was a series of directorates, and in this “lay units devoted to secret operations in support of the Taliban, Kashmiri guerillas, and other violent Islamic radicals.” It was referred to as Directorate S by American intelligence. We come to see the I.S.I. as an institution practiced in manipulating the C.I.A. and the Taliban simultaneously. Considering the length and cost of this war it is interesting to note that no Taliban or other Afghans participated in the September 11 attacks. It was interesting to note that the Taliban, early on, wanted to negotiate an end to the war, but Donald Rumsfeld would have nothing to do with it. In hindsight, maybe he should have considered it. We didn’t get very far in Afghanistan before Rumsfeld was drumming up support for an Iraq invasion. The author saw this as a repeat of an old story: “not only complacency but also inexplicable strategic judgment, fractured decision making, and confusion.”Part Two shows us “losing the peace,” and covers the time period from 2002 to 2006. Are we still there? Here we learn about Operation Anaconda, the largest U.S. military operation since the Gulf War of 1991. Despite this, we see a squandered opportunity to manage a post-conflict environment properly. We go in, overthrow the government, then chaos. It appears that after 2002, Special Forces discovered that there weren’t many Al Qaeda left in Afghanistan. It appears they migrated to Pakistan, yet we continued to fight the Taliban – because they were there. As the author notes, “By our words and actions we destroyed the opportunity to take advantage of the Pashtun mechanism for accommodation and reconciliation.” The Taliban faced war without compromise because of their alliance with Al Qaeda. We also see that I.S.I.’s counterterrorism directorate, though cooperating with the U.S. may have had other directorates that simultaneously supported Pakistan’s indigenous jihadi clients, including the Taliban. It was a complicated situation. Was it really winnable? We see now that the U.S. is resorting to something called “extraordinary rendition,” resulting in extensive human rights abuses against prisoners. We see the C.I.A. departing from Army Field Manual practices into a “science fiction-tinged dystopia of intimidation and dominance over prisoners.” We see these things happening out of a sense of desperation to get some information, any information, because we had so little. By 2004 we see the adoption of a new constitution, mobilization for a presidential election and a new parliament. We also see evidence of a Taliban comeback. In time, we see a both wars deteriorating and a struggle to win the loyalty of the populations. There is a movement now away from counterterrorism operations and towards counterinsurgency against local commanders via the drone program. By 2006, we see a significant increase in the Taliban and more of the workload being turned over to the British, European, and Canadian forces. Soon people were getting fed up with the corrupt new government and welcoming the Taliban back into their districts. Indiscriminate bombing, because of a lack of men and equipment, resulted in enough collateral damage – think civilian lives and property – that the Taliban were sure to exploit. Not only that, but the war in Iraq was becoming a cause celebre for jihadist recruitment.Part Three now covers the period from 2006 to 2009. We now see a significant uptick in suicide bombing increasing to about two to three a week. Spending on security in 2007 was now at $8 billion a year – more than all the previous years combined. By 2006, poppy cultivation in Afghanistan rose sufficiently to provide over 90 percent of the world’s annual heroin supply. One can understand this poppy cultivation in the light of Soviet and US destruction of infrastructure over the years. As money flowed in to encourage farmers to eradicate their poppy fields, we see instead “corruption, agricultural market distortions, and confusion.” You just can’t throw money at some problems, but we see this happen again and again in both Iraq and Afghanistan. By this time, some had felt that the US had not applied enough military force to suppress Al Qaeda and the Taliban, and we see a serious, violent domestic rebellion against the Pakistani state by Islamist forces the state had long nurtured. There was gaining traction for a larger counterinsurgency mission in Afghanistan, and by the time Obama takes office, the conclusion is that we are not losing the war, but we are not winning either. Again we see a marginalization of diplomacy according to Holbrooke (special envoy for Pakistan and Afghanistan). He noted that American policy in the country was becoming a runaway car steered mainly by the Pentagon. And then there was also the rising Afghan anger over civilian casualties, and the popular disgust at the predatory Afghan government and police. What I found intriguing was the fact that fund-raising for the Taliban was sourced to Saudi Arabia and the UAE among other places. These were allies of the US – not?Part Four covers the years 2010 to 2014. It is entitled “The End of Illusion.” At this point, all the Taliban wanted was to find some independence from I.S.I. (Pakistani intelligence) and relief from international sanctions and blacklists. Yet we see Obama dispatching tens of thousands more US troops. Chapter 26 covers some of the down on the ground grunt work and dangers encountered by US troops. As the author put it, referencing 2010, “The gossamer illusions of American partnership with Pakistan and with Hamid Karzai would be exposed in the coming year as never before.” It was during this period that negotiations were attempted to arrange an exit from America’s longest war. By early 2012, negotiation’s had collapsed. We also witness in increase in what was called fratricide killing, where Afghan soldiers were killing their American trainers in large numbers. This insider killing spree had no precedent in the history of modern counterinsurgency. At its worst, “Afghans attempted to kill Americans or Europeans they worked alongside about once every other day.” By 2013, another attempt at peace was attempted in Qatar; this too resulted in “an episode of remarkable diplomatic incompetence” and failure. It was beginning to seem that by this time, “any forecast of the durability of the Afghan forces had to account for the willingness of Congress, European governments, Japan, and others to write large checks to subsidize Kabul indefinitely.” We were looking at a decades-long, South Korea-like commitment. The mission had been to destroy Al Qaeda. Now after all these years of effort, the organization remained active, lethal, and adaptive, and not only that but the Al Qaeda branch seeded into Iraq to challenge the US invasion, and then morphed into the Islamic State, according to the author. It seems that the Iraq invasion was a stumbling block to stabilization in Afghanistan, because it inflamed and mobilized deeper resistance to American counterterrorism policy. Other inflammatory actions were the Guantanamo prison and the C.I.A.’s torture of Al Qaeda suspects. After September 11, the author thus concludes that “The complex wars and the political strategies that followed were often reactive, improvised, and informed by illusions.” It seems that the American war machine just wasn’t well equipped to “build good governance in deeply impoverished, violent landscapes or to win asymmetric conflicts with ideological, media-savvy guerrillas on short time lines.” Let history provide lessons learned.

“When you look into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you.”This observation by nineteenth century German philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche, might well sum up the recent history of American involvement in the Middle East presented in Pulitzer-Prize winning author Stephen Coll’s 2018 work, “Directorate S: The C.I.A. and America’s Secret Wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan”.The author chronicles in great detail the ebb and flow of American involvement in Afghanistan from the late 1980s through roughly 2017 and the start of the Trump presidency. Coll’s writing is engaging, easy to follow and reportorial in style.Starting with US covert support for the mujaheddin-led resistance against the 1980’s Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, the author sets the foundation for the soon-to-be complicated, untrusting relationships among the US, Afghanistan and Pakistan for the next quarter century. And they continue to this day.Several intertwined factors made these relationships complicated from the get-go:• Pakistan’s strategic concern to defend itself against potential aggression by India due to differences in predominant religious beliefs (Muslim vs. Hindu); the loss of Eastern Pakistan (now Bangladesh); on-going dispute over control of Kashmir; Indian military defeats of its armies; Pakistan’s development of nuclear weapons to offset Indian capabilities creating potential jeopardy of exploitation by smaller groups with winner-take-all approaches to achieving dominance.• Afghanistan’s political instability resulting from a long history of weak central self-governance divided among different tribal families speaking different regional languages and dialects, European exploitation by primarily British and Soviet occupations, then, attempt to achieve a unified government with constitution and political structure being worked out between civilian and military groups.• Shifting US goals and strategies in the region: first, countering Soviet expansion; following 9/11, pursuit and destruction of Al Qaeda which morphed into pursuit of the Taliban and various forms of the Islamic State such as ISIS; fluctuating political postures about US commitment to “nation building” versus only achieving military dominance; a steady stream of military and political leadership turnover; and, ultimately, competition, at times self-destructive, among various US intelligence agencies.These conditions led to rise of “deep state” government groups working with or against each other with shifting alliances of expediency: early on, the C.I.A. subcontracted aid to Afghan rebels through Pakistan’s main spy agency, Inter-Services Intelligence, or I.S.I., working on behalf of the Army. Directorate S was I.S.I.’s equivalent to the C.I.A.What quickly becomes apparent was Pakistan’s desire to avoid two-front conflicts by slowing Afghan growth and stability in order to focus its resources on India, specifically reclaiming Kashmir. Support for US pursuit of Al Qaeda and the Taliban is portrayed as a shadowy cat-and-mouse game for the Pakistan military and government, especially within the semi-independent tribal areas along the Afghan-Pakistan border.Neither Afghanistan nor the US initially wanted to pursue Al Qaeda into these areas to avoid a major international conflict. On the other hand, Pakistan worked to keep the flow of US military and monetary support in tact as long as possible. The game played out for a long time and continues in the present day.With frustrations mounting the C.I.A. became more aggressive with its own use of drone strikes against military targets that initially had headline-capturing collateral damage with the civilian casualties. Meanwhile leadership in Washington was clear about its goal for Al Qaeda but less sure what its plans in the area were, especially with the all-consuming Iraq conflict and rise of ISIS. The approaches were at times military only (eliminate Al Qaeda and thwart the Taliban), diplomatic (create an independent Afghanistan with or without Taliban political participation) or a combination of both. One fact became increasingly clear: the US was not prevailing militarily and seemed to be following the British and Soviets into "the graveyard of nations."An example of the complexities of the decision-making process and potential for errors is the debate about whether to eradicate Afghan poppy fields viewed by the US and European allies as a source of funding for Taliban military supplies. The fields were a legacy from the Soviet invasion with its scorched-earth policy forcing poor Afghan families to develop any crop for survival. The crop quickly became critical for sustaining the rural population (and the tribal war lords).At first take to the US and other allies such as Britain, it seemed the success achieved with spraying drug crops in Columbia could be applied to Afghanistan. However, further analysis suggested the impact could lead to widespread insurgency in an already deteriorating situation and drive the locals toward the Taliban.An effort by the British Foreign Office to pay Afghan farmers to eradicate their own poppy crops “yielded corruption, agricultural market distortions, and confusion.” With the Iraq distraction the debate was never resolved.One of the areas the author might have investigated further is the role and importance of mineral deposits, especially for multinational corporations. In an era of corporate hegemony exceeding national and political borders one cannot help but feel other “shadowy” forces are at work ensuring their goals are achieved.Make no mistake: this is a long work. I waffled between a 4 star rating due to its length and complexity and 5 star due to its essential insights for presenting how we got to where we are.By the end of this work, you have the sense "Directorate S" is an updated version of Joseph Heller's classic 1961 "Catch-22." The initial conditions have recycled to the same position: Afghanistan is an archipelago of urban areas controlled by the government with US support and the rural areas controlled by the Taliban. Pakistan's role is ambivalent and the US is still trying to figure out what its goals are.As Nietzsche suggested, this abyss endures and we are in it.

A brilliant book written by an extraordinarily gifted writer.

Eu estou lendo o livro Directorate S é um excelente livro, é um livro cheio de detalhes, e o leitor se sente no meio da historia do livro, nos bastidores da guerra dos EUA, no Afeganistao e no Paquistao, e esse livro é uma continuaçao de outro livro do mesmo auror, Steve Coll com o nome deGhost wars : the secret history of the CIA, Afghanistan and Bin Laden, from the Soviet invasion to September 10, 2001. Penguin. (2004).

A worthy successor to his Pulitzer Prize winning GHOST WARS

Good analysis. However its more focussed on the American narrative rather than Pakistan's. Definitely a read recommendation if some is interested what is actually happening in Afghanistan and how the whole operation went wrong bacause of misunderstandings between ISI and CIA. Real intentions of neither agency cannot be known untill the history is written in future.

LE livre qu'il faut lire sur la guerre en Afghanistan. Steve Coll fournit toutes les clés (notamment et surtout la politique du grand voisin pakistanais, et au coeur de celle-ci, le jeu de l'ISI, les services secrets, dont le Département S s'occupe de l'Afghanistan et des talibans afghans) pour comprendre ce conflit qui aura bientôt 40 ans.