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.