Ghost Wars
Steve Coll
230 pages
published in 1974

When New York and Washington were under attack on September 11, 2001, it came as a bolt out of the blue, just like that other sneak attack permanently etched in the American psyche, the attack on Pearl Harbour on December 7, 1941. The mythology surrounding both attacks would portray the US as innocent victim of cruel, remorseless enemies, but as anybody who paid any attention in the past six years should know by now, the September 11 attacks were in fact blowback, the end result of years, if not decades of bad choices made in America's foreign policy. In Ghost Wars, Steve Coll describes this hidden history behind the attacks, starting with the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 up until September 10, 2001. It makes for fascinating, if depressing reading.

Depressing, because Coll shows you how year after year it seems successive American governments made the wrong choices in Afghanistan. Sometimes these choices were made out of ignorance, sometimes out of indifference, sometimes because other policy concerns were more important. But all those choices helped create Al Quida and eventually would lead to the September 11 attacks. But it's not just American policies that created the Taliban and Bin Laden; Steve Coll also pays attention to the role Saudi Arabia and Pakistan played in first financing the anti-Soviet Afghan resistance and later supporting various parties in the Afghan civil war that followed the Soviet departure.

A few years back I read George Crile's My Enemy's Enemy, which was basically about how Democratic congresssman Charlie Wilson, together with some CIA cronies helped drag the US government into properly supporting the muhajedin. Though published after the September 11 attacks had made clear the consequences of this support, it still had been largely triumphant in its narrative, being basically a cheerful story about how some good old boys had helped the Afghans to kick the USSR out of their country Ghost Wars is much more dark, making clear that these actions had consequences not just for America, but also for Afghanistan and surrounding countries. (And on a sidenote, Charlie Wilson is barely mentioned...)

What Ghost Wars makes clear is that Afghanistan didn't have to end up the way it did, a country occupied by NATO and contested by warlords and fanatical jihadists, that in fact the Taliban's version of Islam was something that could only come about because of decades of civil war and foreign occupation. Before the Soviet invasion of 1979, or rather the Soviet backed coup of 1976, Afghanistan was a poor but relatively peaceful country, in which Islam played a large role in daily life but without the hysterical supremacy the Taliban would give it.

The Soviet invasion inevitable brought resistance, which at first was fairly diverse, consisting of royalists, straight nationalists, Pasthuns, Tajik, etc. Coll makes clear that the US almost from the first day of the Soviet invasion had decided to create or support such resistance, but only with the view of harassing the Soviets, not ever expecting the resistance to be able to defeat them. Therefore America at first only provided a limited support, with some monetary support as well as arms deliviers that could not be traced back to the US, so as not to provoke the USSR too much. It was Pakistan which took the lead in supporting the resistance, directly threatened by the Soviet invasion as well as seeing an opportunity to win strategic influence there. Also crucial in these early stages was Saudi Arabia, as always using their purse to fight their battles. Conservative and religious, Saudi Arabia saw the USSR as a threat to Islam, so was happy to support any Islamic resistance group. The US was happy to follow the Pakistani lead, even after they had become more involved, and sometimes against the advice of their people on the ground. All this naturally helped shape the Afghan resistance, with Pakistan advantaging those groups best suited for its purposing and disadvantaging those that were inclined to be more independent minded. The Saudis meanwhile found the Afghan plight a welcome distraction for their more hotheaded religious fanatics, who'd otherwise be bothering the royal house at home, people like Bin Laden.

It was only after the Soviet forces had left Afghanistan, in 1989, that the consenquences of all this became known. A civil war followed, in which the various resistance groups tried to take control of the country, which ultimately would put the Taliban in power. It's at this point that the US made its worst mistakes, by turning its back on Afghanistan, by making no serious attempt to peacefully resolve the conflict, by fundamentally no konger being interested in the country now that the USSR was no longer involved. There was some excuse for this, as there were so many other issues demanding attention at the time, but it remains a missed opportunity.

Steve Coll makes clear that American policy on Afghanistan, as well on Bin Laden's rise as a global terrorist, remained fundamentally indecisive, with opinions divided amongst the few policy makers still paying attention to either. He's particularly scathing about the US waffing on whether or not to support the one remaining power standing in the way of the Taliban's total control of the country by the late nineties, Ahmed Shah Massoud, destined to be murdered two days before September 11, 2001. There had been multiple opportunities all through the nineties and eighties for America to forge closer ties to Massoud, one of the genuinely independent Afghan leaders, but American mistrust and indifference botched them all. Whether this made any difference in the end is of course speculative.

Ghost Wars also makes clear that even after the embassy bombings in Africa in 1997, Bin Laden, Al Quida and international terrorism never quite became the top priority for the US government. The Clinton administration was therefore reluctant to act against Bin Laden unless they could be very sure it could be done without negative consequences. Coll spends a lot of Ghost Wars detailing the ways in which action could've been taken and the reasons why it wasn't. Naturally, his sympathies lie with the CIA middle echelon argueing for a more agressive approach.

In conclusion, Ghost Wars is an excellent book detailing the "secret history" behind the September 11 attacks. It cannot quite escape an American-centric point of view, but is very good at showing how Pakistani and Saudi Arabian influences on Afghanistan helped shape the country. One major side of the story however remains largely untold here, that of how the Taliban and what would become Al Quida developed, as seen from their point of view.

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