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An interesting new book by the journalist Steve Coll.
https://www.ft.com/content/6685bb2a-01de-11e8-9650-9c0ad2d7c5b5
https://www.washingtonpost.com/outl...22769454f82_story.html?utm_term=.2dfe55403a8d
The secret struggle for Afghanistan
Journalist Steve Coll investigates the encounter between the CIA and Pakistan’s ‘Directorate S’
In March 2008, three American senators flew to Kabul to assess the state of the conflict still ravaging Afghanistan more than six years after the US invasion. Joe Biden, who had recently quit the race for the Democratic presidential nomination, was joined by Chuck Hagel and John Kerry — a team, it turned out, that would later deal with Afghanistan as vice-president, secretary of defence and secretary of state in the administration of President Barack Obama.
As the trio returned to Kabul in Black Hawk helicopters following a tour of eastern Afghanistan, the general escorting them pointed out that Tora Bora — the mountain cave complex where Osama bin Laden hid after the invasion — was nearby. Hagel, a Vietnam veteran, advised against flying closer because there was a blizzard approaching and they were low on fuel, but Biden, who was the senior of the group, insisted that they take a detour. The helicopters ended up making emergency landings, leaving the three men in their sixties stranded in the snow within sight of armed locals; after hiking for an hour they were rescued by US troops.
According to Directorate S, a spectacular account of 15 years of secret CIA and US military operations in Afghanistan and Pakistan by the investigative journalist and academic Steve Coll, the day was about to get even worse. That evening the senators dined with Hamid Karzai, the elite Afghan who had become president after the CIA whisked him into Afghanistan from Pakistan on a motorcycle following the invasion. By then, Karzai was a quixotic figure prone to lash out at the Americans. After he declared that the US hadn’t “done anything” for his country, Biden banged the table, announced that “This conversation, this dinner, is over”, and stormed out. Karzai was unaware that Biden’s son was about to be deployed to Afghanistan.
It is difficult not to see this episode as a metaphor for the war as a whole. Ill-considered decisions, unreliable allies and misunderstandings were always at the heart of the problems that only two weeks earlier had led Condoleezza Rice, then secretary of state for George W Bush, to conclude during a visit to the country that “this war isn’t working”.
The senators’ visit epitomised the turbulent relationship between the US and Afghanistan — and particularly Karzai — that underpinned and undermined US efforts in the longest war in American history. It also prefigured the further deterioration in relations with Karzai that would occur after Obama inherited the Afghan conflict from Bush, who had retained a reasonable bond with his Afghan counterpart.
Directorate S is the sequel to Coll’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Ghost Wars (2004), the definitive account of the CIA, Afghanistan and Osama bin Laden before September 11, 2001. The title of the new book derives from the US name for the secret unit inside Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) spy agency responsible for sponsoring and funding Taliban activities in Afghanistan and Pakistan, ostensibly as a bulwark against its arch-rival India.
Coll reveals in detail the complex web of tensions, rivalries, suspicions and pure blunders that has prevented the US from being able to declare “mission accomplished” in Afghanistan. Through meticulous accounts of meetings between the key players, he demonstrates how an incredible lack of trust between Washington, Kabul and Islamabad — and frequently between competing agencies and characters within each of the three countries — all but doomed the US adventure from the start.
Along the way we get illustrations of the power of American intelligence, from the simple ability to detect that an Afghan man was using a pigeon to warn the Taliban about US patrols, to the satellites that allow pilots in Nevada to unleash Hellfire missiles from drones over Pakistan. But Directorate S also exposes how bureaucratic infighting and severe miscommunication between US agencies offset these technological advantages and hampered the war effort.
On one occasion, Gary Schroen, a CIA operative in Afghanistan, received a call from the person in charge of flying Predator drones over the country. The mission manager said they had detected two al-Qaeda agents dressed in western clothing who were standing beside an airstrip that the Taliban had just built. Schroen replied that they were aiming their drone missiles at his tall, bearded CIA colleague on an airstrip that the agency itself was constructing.
With impressive access to American, Afghan and Pakistani intelligence, Coll reveals the extent of the surveillance undertaken by all sides. At the same time that the US National Security Agency (NSA) was spying on ISI director Ahmad Pasha, for example, Pasha was spying on someone closer to home.
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https://www.ft.com/content/6685bb2a-01de-11e8-9650-9c0ad2d7c5b5
After becoming CIA director in 2009, Leon Panetta flew to Pakistan where he dined with Pasha and Asif Ali Zardari, Pakistan’s then president. During their meal, Zardari commented: “Ahmad knows everything I think and everything I say . . . I walk into my office every morning and say, ‘Hello Ahmad’!” The CIA later concluded that the Pakistani leader was the number one surveillance target for his own spy agency.
Coll outlines how US ties with Pakistan evolved over the tenures of Bush and Obama, with bouts of co-operation interrupted by periods when there was almost no trust. At one point, as the US was holding secret negotiations with the Taliban, Pakistani army chief Ashfaq Kayani and the ISI were helping the Taliban draft statements in the name of its leader Mullah Omar, whose location they claimed not to know even as he was dying in a hospital in Karachi.
But the deceit ran both ways. After a CIA operative was arrested for shooting dead two Pakistanis, Panetta told Pasha and Hussain Haqqani, Pakistan’s then ambassador to the US, that he was not working for the CIA. Haqqani later accused him of lying and said, “If you’re going to send a Jason Bourne to our country, make sure he has the skills to get out like Jason Bourne.”
Directorate S has a cast of characters that make Bourne movies pale in comparison — from type-A CIA officers and paramilitaries to cigar-smoking and whisky-drinking Pakistani generals to a dog nicknamed “Lucky” because he was able to detect incoming missile strikes from drones before they hit.
Coll rigorously explains why Pakistan pursued a double game and why US concerns about Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal meant that Washington never took as hard a stance with Islamabad as it otherwise might have. He also documents why Karzai waxed and waned with respect to the US, which was mostly because he was angry that the US was not cracking down on the ISI over its clandestine support for the Taliban.
While recognising these constraints, Coll reserves strong criticism for a US that he says was “blinded” to its limitations in Afghanistan. There were a host of reasons for this, including complacency resulting from the initial thundering defeat of the Taliban and also the “disastrous decision” to invade Iraq, which made it easier for the Taliban to attract new recruits at home. Both the Bush and Obama administrations, Coll writes, “tolerated and even promoted stovepiped, semi-independent campaigns waged simultaneously by different agencies of American government”.
His conclusion, which will be unwelcome in Islamabad, is that “the failure to solve the riddle of the ISI and to stop its covert interference in Afghanistan became, ultimately, the greatest strategic failure of the American war”.
Directorate S: The CIA and America’s Secret Wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan, 2001–2016, by Steve Coll, Allen Lane, RRP£25/Penguin Press, RRP$35, 784 pages
https://www.ft.com/content/6685bb2a-01de-11e8-9650-9c0ad2d7c5b5
America’s slow-motion military and policy disaster in Afghanistan and Pakistan
In Kabul in December, Afghan President Ashraf Ghani told Vice President Pence that more senior Taliban members had been killed in 2017 than in the previous 15 years combined. “Real progress,” Pence said. The dry language of wire reports does not reveal whether this reply was delivered in the sarcastic tone one might expect, given the utter chaos now reigning in Afghanistan. There are times when one wishes pool reporters used emoticons in their dispatches.
Steve Coll’s “Directorate S: The C.I.A. and America’s Secret Wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan” is an account of a slow-motion military and policy disaster. It is sometimes as affectless as a wire report, but the unadorned facts in its narrative more than suffice to stoke bafflement and despair. After 17 years of war in Afghanistan, more than 100,000 Afghans are dead, and the Taliban and the Islamic State are competing to inflict wanton violence on civilians in the capital. The only thing U.S. policymakers know for sure is that the situation will degrade fast if we leave. It will probably degrade slowly and expensively if we stay. Previous attempts at discreet draw-downs have not, Coll notes, been dignified or had positive results. In 2014, at a ceremony marking the end of a phase of U.S. combat in Afghanistan, “the ceremony program noted that attendees should lie down flat on the ground in the event of a rocket attack.”
Coll’s book is chronological, and mostly a catalogue of mistakes made and lessons learned far too late, if at all. He quotes a soldier who summarized his job to Eliot Cohen, then counselor of the State Department: “You walk through a valley until you get into a firefight and then you keep shooting until it stops.” (“That’s a little troubling,” Cohen replies.) Various strategies are attempted — the current one, conceived at the end of the Obama era, involves vigorous use of drones and commando teams — but at no point after 2003 does the United States recover the initiative. Almost every endeavor threatens to be undone in a moment. By 2012, a quarter of the soldiers killed in the U.S.-led alliance were killed by the very Afghan soldiers they were training.
“Directorate S,” by Steve Coll (Penguin Press)
The mistakes are legion. First, in the heady days after Sept. 11, 2001, U.S. spies were fighting a war with “blood in the mouth” — an attitude that the CIA’s battlefield commander describes as a “burning need for retribution.” This attitude inspired numerous shortsighted policies in the war on terrorism, including the opening of Guantanamo Bay’s prison camp and the policy of making no distinction between al-Qaeda militants and those who harbored them. Most of the Taliban fighters were ornery yokels, with only the vaguest understanding of what America was. They did not require annihilation — of course, we slowly discovered that we couldn’t kill them all anyway — and they could, at some point, have been incorporated into the Afghan state rather than hunted in endless war. Moreover, the Taliban had provided order, and the United States had no plan to install and nurture a similarly orderly government. Afghans quickly grew irritated at an occupier skilled at fighting but uninterested or incompetent at governing.
Coll’s strongest sections detail the relationship not with the Taliban but with Pakistan. Pakistan is a democracy of 193 million people. But the force that determines its national security and foreign policy is not its elected politicians but its spy agency, Inter-Services Intelligence, or ISI. The agency has a staff of 25,000, and it is not paranoia but good sense to assume that if you are a journalist or politician in Pakistan, its agents are watching you. Foreign government officials treat its director — always a high-ranking army general — all but officially as Pakistan’s leader. Its most secretive division, Directorate S, controls covert operations “in support of the Taliban, Kashmiri guerrillas, and other violent Islamic radicals.”
ISI has been demonized both justly and unjustly; shadowy bureaucracies tend to be spotted in the shadows even when they aren’t there. But Coll’s account of the agency makes it hard to treat it as benign, overall. The Afghan Taliban fights with ISI’s blessing, and its members drop into Pakistani territory to rest and re-equip. (More than one policymaker has concluded that this problem of Pakistani sanctuaries makes defeating the Taliban impossible.) ISI analysts themselves acknowledge the desire to cultivate Taliban fighters for future deployment, especially in Kashmir. According to one estimate, Coll says, 100,000 militants are in Pakistan on ISI’s watch.
Coll reports that the late Richard Holbrooke, tasked by President Barack Obama with fixing the region, considered ISI “obsessed” with India and thought its policy toward Afghanistan was motivated by a desire to curtail perceived Indian influence. I tend to agree. Before 2001, ISI enjoyed access to Afghanistan as “strategic depth” for Pakistan’s war against India. We remember the al-Qaeda training camps in Afghanistan, complete with monkey-bar obstacle courses, but we forget the many more Pakistani-run camps for guerrillas preparing to fight in the heights of Kashmir. ISI viewed the government of Afghan President Hamid Karzai as too India-friendly, and by 2003 — after the United States distracted itself with Iraq — ISI resumed its meddling in Afghanistan, to stave off Indian influence.
Finally, Coll identifies the Iraq invasion of 2003 as a costly distraction for the United States and a boon for Afghanistan’s forces of chaos. In 2003, Coll writes, “the National Security Council met to discuss Afghanistan only twice.” Meanwhile, the enemy extracted useful lessons from Iraq and began to apply them at home. Those ornery Taliban, once inwardly focused, came to learn from, and in some cases consider themselves part of, a global jihad. They acquired a taste for wanton slaughter — a hallmark of the Jordanian terror master Abu Musab al-Zarqawi but not of the Taliban previously — and became a pet movement for the religious fanatics of Pakistan and elsewhere.
[‘The Wrong Enemy: America in Afghanistan, 2001-2014’ by Carlotta Gall]
Coll himself is, in the venerable tradition of newspaper reporting, absent from the narrative, although his harsh judgment of U.S. policymakers is pervasive. Absolutely nothing works; “the United States and Europe,” Coll writes, “have remade Afghanistan with billions of dollars in humanitarian and construction aid while simultaneously contributing to its violence, corruption, and instability.” “Directorate S” is one of the most unrelentingly bleak assessments of U.S. policy of recent years, and it shows, regrettably, that American errors have accumulated beyond recovery. The question is less whether Afghanistan can be saved than how its failure will affect the region. The billion-plus citizens of Pakistan and India have now enjoyed a generation without war, and the fall of Afghanistan could contribute to a premature end to that holiday.
Coll’s previous book on Afghanistan, the Pulitzer Prize winner “Ghost Wars,” is widely considered the best book on U.S. policy in Afghanistan before Sept. 11, 2001. This superlative actually undersells it: If you tore the book into two pieces, the resulting ragged scraps would be the best and second-best books on Afghanistan, respectively. This companion volume is also definitive, if different in effect. “Ghost Wars” struck a tragic tone, with a disastrous conclusion known to the reader. The conclusion of the policy blunders chronicled in “Directorate S” is not known. But because the errors so often look, in retrospect, unforced, they are just as painful to contemplate, and they should induce shudders as we consider the conclusion to which we might be hurtling this time.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/outl...22769454f82_story.html?utm_term=.2dfe55403a8d
