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Directorate S: The C.I.A. and America's Secret Wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan, by Steve Coll. New York: Penguin, 2018. 784 pages. $35.
Reviewed by Robert Nichols
Many in Washington, DC, with a career and institutional investment in American foreign policy have already read Steve Coll's latest first draft of history. Serious policymakers in Washington indirectly involved in America's interests abroad have already read one of several important reviews of the book, also mentioned here. Through more than 550 interviews, Coll documents the limits and failures of Western and Afghan intelligence, military, and policy efforts in Afghanistan after September 2001. The nominal focus of the book is how the American effort was undercut and opposed by Directorate S of the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), Pakistan's spy agency.
The book is in fact an illuminating institutional history of American, Afghan, and Pakistani intelligence agencies and government departments as they, over many years, pursued careerist and national interests at the expense of peace and security in Afghanistan. All who have not read Coll's new volume should do so, perhaps with a rereading of his earlier Ghost Wars as well other books that help explain the current problems in Afghanistan.1 One could also reread Paul Kennedy's familiar The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, which noted:
The triumph of any one Great Power in this period, or the collapse of another, has usually been the consequence of lengthy fighting by its armed forces; but it has also been the consequence of the more or less efficient utilization of the state's productive economic resources in wartime, and, further in the background, of the way in which that state's economy had been rising...