Directorate S: The C.I.A. and America's Secret Wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan, 2001-2016
by Steve Coll
30 popular highlights from this book
Key Insights & Memorable Quotes
Below are the most popular and impactful highlights and quotes from Directorate S: The C.I.A. and America's Secret Wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan, 2001-2016:
“In the Oval Office, President Bush told Khalilzad, “Musharraf denies all of what you are saying.” “Didn’t they deny, Mr. President, for years that they had a nuclear program?” 8 Bush said he would call Musharraf and arrange for the ambassador to meet with him, to discuss the accusations directly. Khalilzad flew to Islamabad. Beforehand, he sent Musharraf a gift, a crate of Afghan pomegranates. When they sat down, Musharraf thanked him, but added that he hated pomegranates—too many seeds. They talked extensively about Musharraf’s usual complaints about the Afghan government—too many Panjshiris in key security positions, too many Indian spies under diplomatic cover in Kabul and elsewhere. Khalilzad proposed a joint intelligence investigation between the United States and Pakistan to document any covert Indian activity in Afghanistan. “There are no Taliban here,” Musharraf said blankly. 9”
“One view at the highest levels of the U.S. embassy in Kabul by summer’s end was that Karzai “was a very clever madman—just because he was insane doesn’t mean he was stupid.”
“I believed in the Taliban when they first appeared,” Karzai later conceded. “I gave them fifty thousand dollars to help them out, and then handed them a cache of weapons I had hidden near Kandahar. . . . They were good people initially, but the tragedy was that very soon after they were taken over by the I.S.I.”
“Come on, Wendy, Al Qaeda could not have done this,” Musharraf said. “They’re in caves. They don’t have the technology to do something like this.” “General, frankly, I disagree. They did this with box cutters.” 8”
“there is an old adage: If the guerillas do not lose, they ultimately win. . . .”
“By the spring of 2004 it was evident that the Iraq war’s casus belli had been grounded in false intelligence reporting about Saddam Hussein’s possession of biological and nuclear weapons. Press leaks from the White House fingered George Tenet’s C.I.A. for this embarrassment”
“Phrases like “hearts and minds” first arose in public discourse in the 1890s. The French called the strategy “peaceful penetration.”
“Powell’s superiors at State had instructed her before she departed for Islamabad not to get into cabling wars with the U.S. embassies in Kabul and India over I.S.I.’ s conduct or other sources of controversy about Pakistan. But Khalilzad raised the temperature. In one cable, Powell felt that he had attempted to question her “loyalty and patriotism” simply because she had tried to describe Pakistan’s position of relative weakness in relation to the Taliban and the fact that the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan “has never ever been controlled.”
“The U.S.-led coalition dropped about twelve thousand bombs on Afghanistan that autumn, about 40 percent of them “dumb,” or unguided, according to an analysis by Carl Conetta of the Center for International Policy. Hank Crumpton at the Counterterrorist Center estimated that the campaign killed “at least ten thousand” foreign and Taliban fighters, “perhaps double or triple that number.” By the conservative estimate of Boston University political scientist Neta Crawford, between 1,500 and 2,375 Afghan civilians also died.”
“Schroen’s men had carried in $ 10 million in boxed cash. They handed out bundles like candy on Halloween. Schroen had recruited onto his team Chris Wood, the Dari-speaking case officer who had worked the Taliban account out of Islamabad. Wood ran the day-to-day intelligence reporting at the joint cell, collecting and synthesizing field radio reports about Taliban and Al Qaeda positions and movements.”
“Black Label–sipping Pakistani generals with London flats and daughters on Ivy League campuses had been managing jihadi guerrilla campaigns against India and in Afghanistan for two decades.”
“The military-industrial complex was one of Pakistan’s binding forces, alongside Islam, national pride, suspicion of India and America, and cricket.”
“the Bagram conference, the idea was that Saleh and Kayani would exchange details about Al Qaeda and its allies. Detainees in N.D.S. custody had reported taking instructions in Mansehra, a mountain valley town in western Pakistan. Some even suggested Bin Laden might be hiding there. Saleh briefed Kayani on his intelligence. “Which house?” the Pakistani spy chief asked. “You’ll have to do the last one hundred yards yourself,” Saleh answered. “This is unbelievable,” Kayani said, meaning the N.D.S. reporting was not credible. Saleh said he would offer access to his source if Kayani agreed to work with the C.I.A. on the matter. “Are you telling me you are spying in my country?” “Yes.”
“Musharraf allowed the C.I.A. to operate drones armed with Hellfires in designated sections of the tribal areas. The C.I.A. agreed to deny that Musharraf had authorized any such thing.”
“C.I.A. had “a culture of insularity.” The attitude they projected was “Nobody should tell us what to do. We got it. We are special”
“Altogether, the United States handed over to Afghanistan about $900 million of “foreign excess real property”—military hand-me-downs of various kinds—and destroyed another $46 million worth because the items were too sensitive or impractical to transfer. The largest single gift was Camp Leatherneck, the United States Marine base in Helmand, valued at $235 million; the Marines lowered the American flag and flew away in late October.28”
“America failed to achieve its aims in Afghanistan for many reasons: underinvestment in development and security immediately after the Taliban’s fall; the drains on resources and the provocations caused by the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq; corruption fed by N.A.T.O. contracting and C.I.A. deal making with strongmen; and military hubris at the highest levels of the Pentagon. Yet the failure to solve the riddle of I.S.I. and to stop its covert interference in Afghanistan became, ultimately, the greatest strategic failure of the American war.”
“Integrating the military and diplomatic track is essential for success. . . . Nixon and Kissinger encountered this problem, and were defeated by it; when they began negotiating with Hanoi in 1969 there were 550,000 American troops in Vietnam, but under domestic pressure, Nixon unilaterally drew down to about 135,000 while Kissinger negotiated for almost five years. By the time they cut the final deal in later 1973, the two men were like the losers in a strip poker game, naked. They had no chips—or clothes—left with which to bargain; the result was a communist takeover of our South Vietnamese ally less than two years later. Roughly the same thing happened to the Soviets in Afghanistan, without even the negotiating.”
“As Eikenberry once put it to him, “If you had a choice about where to deploy thirty thousand new American troops, you would put five thousand into training Afghan forces, five thousand along the border with Pakistan, and twenty thousand in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas,” inside Pakistan. “That’s exactly the point,” Karzai answered. “You’re fighting a second-best strategy. You’re fighting Taliban foot soldiers in Afghanistan and destabilizing the country. You can’t play the game of saying Pakistan is your ally and telling me in private that they’re not.”14”
“you can send a battalion of U.S. Marines, not only anywhere in Afghanistan, but literally anywhere in the world, and they will clear an area. Anywhere in South-Central Asia, a battalion of Marines is going to be so tactically dominant that they can clear that area. And as long as you are willing to keep them there, they can hold it. . . . The problem is handing the cleared area to the Afghans and doing something with it.”10”
“The Marines were not even under McChrystal’s command at this point; they reported directly to Marine leadership at Central Command in Tampa, Florida. The problem of fractured command identified in the last Bush administration review remained almost a year later.8”
“McChrystal knew he could not “defeat” the Taliban with the troops available, although it was not clear at this point whether that was truly America’s objective.”
“Mr. Ambassador,” Rice replied, “in counterinsurgency, if it doesn’t seem like you’re winning, you’re not winning.” She added, “This war isn’t working.”20”
“McNeill argued, the war hadn’t changed. They had to be patient. Privately, McNeill figured it would take up to two decades to put Afghan forces in a position where they could defend the country adequately on their own.”
“Major General Douglas Lute to the White House to coordinate support for the dual American war efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan. In time, Lute would become Washington’s most important policy adviser on Afghanistan, but in his early days at the White House, he spent at least 90 percent of his time managing the fiasco in Iraq. Lute was among those at the White House who were enthusiastic about the District Assessments project.”
“Yet the failure to solve the riddle of I.S.I. and to stop its covert interference in Afghanistan became, ultimately, the greatest strategic failure of the American war. —”
“September 11 made plain how the security of ordinary Afghans was connected to the security of ordinary Americans and Europeans.”
“his administration had just finished “a top-to-bottom review of our strategy” in Afghanistan. Bush laid out renewed aims: “To help the people of that country to defeat the terrorists and establish a stable, moderate, and democratic state that respects the rights of its citizens, governs its territory effectively, and is a reliable ally in this war against extremists and terrorists.” He admitted, “Oh, for some that may seem like an impossible task. But it’s not impossible.”11 In fact, the war on the ground was deteriorating by the month. Its challenges had at last attracted the White House’s attention. Yet the Bush administration’s new strategy remained informed by undue optimism, not least because Afghanistan still looked much better than Iraq. Bush was defensive about the comparison.”
“By September the Canadians had come to realize that every time they pulled back from a firefight to refit on their bases, Taliban reinforcements slipped in to take up the positions vacated by their departed martyrs. It “was like digging a hole in the ocean,” Fraser reflected.34”
“One problem, McChrystal believed, was that Special Operations units lacked a common understanding of how to fight without making the insurgencies worse. Again and again, he heard, “We have got to take the gloves off.” McChrystal asked, “What are you talking about? What do we mean here?” He wanted his officers to reflect on experiences like those the French had endured in Vietnam and Algeria, where they had already documented “what works and what doesn’t work.”14 David Barno, McChrystal’s”
