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Coll, Steve. Ghost Wars: The secret History of the CM, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September W, 2001. New York: Penguin, 2004. 695pp. $29.95
The events of 9/11 led many in the United States to wonder what had actually led up to that fateful day. Who was to blame? How could the United States, with its multibillion-dollar intelligence and defense budgets, have allowed such a thing to happen? In Ghost Wars, Steve Coll provides a useful, if overly long, chronology and analysis of pivotal events, missteps, indecision, apathy, and ultimately tragedy up to the day before the attacks.
Coll, who served as the managing editor for the Washington Post until 2004, was the paper's South Asia bureau chief from 1989 to 1992. He won a Pulitzer Prize in 1990 for his reporting on South Asia, and he has been a keen observer of events in the region. He begins his story with the burning of the U.S. embassy in Islamabad, Pakistan, in November 1979 and traces the long road of...