Directorate S - Steve Coll

Winner of the the National Book Critics Circle Award for Non-Fiction

'Spellbinding
... a magisterial account of the great tragedy of our age ... it is a classic' Evening Standard
'In the finest traditions of American investigative journalism' The Times
'Spectacular ... makes Bourne movies pale in comparison' Financial Times

From the Pulitzer Prize winning of the acclaimed Ghost Wars, this is the full story of America's grim involvement in the affairs of Afghanistan from 2001 to 2016. In the wake of the terrible shock of 9/11, the C.I.A. scrambled to work
out how to destroy Bin Laden and his associates.
The C.I.A. had long
familiarity with Afghanistan and had worked closely with the Taliban to
defeat the Soviet Union there.
A tangle of assumptions, old contacts,
favours and animosities were now reactivated.
Superficially the
invasion was quick and efficient, but Bin Laden's successful escape,
together with that of much of the Taliban leadership, and a catastrophic
failure to define the limits of NATO's mission in a tough, impoverished
country the size of Texas, created a quagmire which lasted many years.

At
the heart of the problem lay 'Directorate S', a highly secretive arm of
the Pakistan state which had its own views on the Taliban and
Afghanistan's place in a wider competition for influence between
Pakistan, India and China, and which assumed that the U.S.A. and its
allies would soon be leaving.


Steve Coll's remarkable new book
tells a powerful, bitter story of just how badly foreign policy
decisions can go wrong and of many lives lost.