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Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and bin Laden, from the Soviet Invas ion to September 10, 2001
Unavailable
Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and bin Laden, from the Soviet Invas ion to September 10, 2001
Unavailable
Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and bin Laden, from the Soviet Invas ion to September 10, 2001
Audiobook26 hours

Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and bin Laden, from the Soviet Invas ion to September 10, 2001

Written by Steve Coll

Narrated by Malcolm Hillgartner

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

4/5

()

Currently unavailable

Currently unavailable

About this audiobook

The explosive first-hand account of America's secret history in Afghanistan

With the publication of Ghost Wars, Steve Coll became not only a Pulitzer Prize winner, but also the expert on the rise of the Taliban, the emergence of Bin Laden, and the secret efforts by CIA officers and their agents to capture or kill Bin Laden in Afghanistan after 1998.
LanguageEnglish
Release dateOct 27, 2011
ISBN9781101548981
Unavailable
Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and bin Laden, from the Soviet Invas ion to September 10, 2001
Author

Steve Coll

Steve Coll is a staff writer at the New Yorker, the dean of the Columbia Journalism School, and the bestselling author of seven books. Previously he served as president of the New America Foundation and worked for two decades at the Washington Post, where he won the Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Journalism for a four-part series on the Securities and Exchange Commission during Ronald Reagan’s presidency. The award-winning series became the basis for Eagle on the Street (1991), coauthored with David A. Vise. Coll’s other books include New York Times Notable Book The Deal of the Century (1998); Ghost Wars (2004), winner of the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction; The Bin Ladens (2009), winner of the PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction; and Private Empire (2012), winner of the Financial Times and McKinsey Business Book of the Year Award.  

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Reviews for Ghost Wars

Rating: 4.176980020297029 out of 5 stars
4/5

404 ratings26 reviews

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  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    This is an exhaustive review of everything that happened with regard to the CIA in Afghanistan leading up to the Sept 11, 2001 terrorist attacks in the US. When I say exhaustive I do mean exhaustive. There are an awful lot of names and elaborate side-plots to keep track of in a book that covers 1979-2001. As someone who was not alive for the vast majority of this period, I learned a lot about American politics and history by reading this book and feel like I have a much better grasp of the issues. It is particularly relevant to recent international problems surrounding ISIS/L.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Fascinating and depressing read--This is a good one for anyone who thinks that foreign relations aren't that complicated or who misses out on the necessity of knowing a region's history before entangling his or her country in a conflict.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Worthwhile read. A sweeping history of US intervention in Afghanistan
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Detailed, yet exhilaratingly exciting, expose of the build up to "9/11" - a deep and broad, comprehensive, narrative.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    An outstanding documentary of what led up to the 9/11 attacks. A thorough explanation of how things weren't done and why. The politics of what led to so many changed lives. This also helps one partially understand why we are still fighting in Afghanistan. Hindsight is indeed 20/20.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Great book. A very eye opening book, albeit a sad one to listen to. There were a few issues with the audio track where the end of some chapters got clipped before the end of the sentence, but you're still able to follow what was being said.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Great book! Very eye opening on all the work that goes into tracking such a celebrity criminal and the lessons to be learned in the process.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    This was really a Great book, but the sound quality was bad..
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    This book chronicles the rise of the jihadist movement, starting with mujahedin fighters in Afghanistan during the Soviet occupation in the 1980s. It continues with the rise of the Taliban and the influence and collaboration with bin Laden. The book ends on September 10, 2001. When reading this book you’ll find yourself continually asking why THEY didn’t listen to THOSE who were shouting warnings.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Interesting and important reading even in 2017 with the basic facts leading up to 9/11 pretty well known by anyone who has devoted even modest attention to the subject. Where the book excels in my opinion is in describing just how U.S. policy is crafted at the highest levels. And it does not make for reassuring reading. Competing agencies, agendas, philosophies and personalities at the highest levels of the U.S. Government make policy really, really difficult to get right or to change. That is just the nature of our system. The big takeaway from this book is how little has changed since those years. We remain tethered to Saudi Arabia and Pakistan in a way that almost defies belief. They were both shown in this book to have had huge roles in the rise and success of Islamic extremism whether through support of the Taliban or the funding of ideological madhouse madrassas that generated countless volunteers for the worldwide Jihad. Neither of those salient facts have changed in 16 years. The Saudis (and others) continue to fund Wahabist thought worldwide, the Paks (ISI) still support the Taliban and the U.S. continues to pretend both are our 'allies'. They say that generals like to fight the 'last war', especially if they won. The U.S. seems to still want to fight the last war (Cold War) as a national strategy, i.e. vs. the Russians. The only war that matters in the world today is the one against the ideology of Islam, which clearly seeks to dominate the world. It's kind of like reading Mein Kampf, the Koran spells out with great clarity the plans and goals of Islam but the West prefers to bury it's collective head in the dirt and scream about 'the Russians are coming'!
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Essential, bloody, real and tragic.One important underlying issue is what this means for the future, because there are similarities between the inflation of the Afghan government with western cash and the situation in South Vietnam during the 1960s and early 1970s. Does an Afghan security force left to fend for itself go the way of the South Vietnamese military after "Vietnamisation"? Before you say you don't care, ask the family of every casualty in Afghanistan what their sacrifice was for.The CIA has been doing this stuff for a long time. In fact, when Afghans were fist trying to rid themselves of the Taliban, (even today roughly 7% want them), the US had helped them with money, and paid Massoud to do it. Finally, AQ helped the Taliban assassinate Massoud, on 2001. Even now, I suppose, Karzai needs a bit of money to do things. The Trumptards shell out a lot more to Palestinians.The West had a strange fascination for 20th century Afghanistan. This small, poor but unbelievably robust country became a symbol for foreign misadventure, mistakes, misguided policy and misplaced ambition. The sun never began to set on the Portuguese Empire here, like it did in Macau, Mozambique, Angola, Brasil, São Tomé and Príncipe, East Timor, Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau, etc.; in Afghanistan the mighty Red Soviet Bear got trapped in the mountains, and the American eagle got its wings clipped. This astonishing account of these invasions, resistances, shadowy leaders and chess moves fully deserves its Pulitzer Prize. As well as a thorough, analytical military and political history, it's also something of a page turning thriller. There are CIA agents handing over briefcases of dollars in desert tents, disappearing American missiles, secret exchanges and coded messages. This is an essential read for anyone with an interest in foreign policy, the misery of modern realpolitik and the tragedies of war itself. There's the blood of many nations in these pages.More than one article I've read online has observed that the West's obsession with it, dates back to Britain's pre-eminent geostrategist of the late 19th century Halford Mckinder who called Afghanistan 'the hinge of the earth' and that whoever controlled the hinge, controlled the world. He also called that area the Heartland, or the pivot, and is considered the father of geostrategy and geopolitics.As this books amply shows, early conquerors, monarchs, republics couldn't govern without the "world's second oldest profession".
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    An outstanding book whose contents were infuriating.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    The book is well-detailed and very clear for the amount of information it covers. However, I felt very cold and distant from the narrative.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    A great overview of the involvement of the US in Pakistan, Afghanistan and their relationship with Saudi Arabia. This book chronicles the support for Afghan fighters during the Soviet invasion, the lack of accountability for CIA involvement in that war, and the consequences leading to the rise of the Taliban, Al Qaeda, which culminates in the Sep 11, 2001 World Trade Center attacks. The documentation here supports the decline of the CIA over the past 20 years and the inability of US intelligence gathering and covert operations to operate effectively against the new threats of terrorism, enemies that are not nation-states, and irregular forces.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    This book is well-researched and thorough. The writing style is journalistic.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    This is an amazing look at the Afghanistan conflict beginning at the withdrawal of Soviet forces to the bombing of the world Trade Center. It examines the role of the CIA and Pakistan’s ISI in Afghanistan.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I read this because it won the Pulitzer Nonfiction prize in 2005. It is an excellently researched book and clearly written, detailing carefully the events from Dec 1979 in Afghanistan till Sep 10, 2001. But it is painful reading, since one knows that all the work put into seeking to have things go right in Afghanistan and stopping bin Laden's devil-inspired plans will not be successful.. I could not find much to blame as to the efforts made, at least during the Clinton administration. The Bush people really never got to the problem till it was too late. Important but not fun reading.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    An incredibly detailed history of American involvement with Afghanistan and Osama Bin Laden prior to 09-11. If you are really a student of world affairs and not just interested in the hyperbole and headlines, this weighty (588 pages not including extensive notes) is worth the read.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Ghost Wars is a look at the history of Afghanistan from a the early 1980's until 2001. The book describes the Soviet occupation of the country, the birth of radical ideals and the Taliban and the conditions that made it possible for Osama bin Laden to make the country the seat of his power. An excellent book for anyone interested in the countries history as well as people who want to understand the complities faced be the US and NATO forces currently in Afghanistan.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    This is an outstanding account of American policy towards Afghanistan from about 1977 till September 2001 and more specifically about CIA operations within that country and aimed at dealing with the international Jihadists it spawned. Probably the best book of its kind that I have read as the policy debates and decision-making process in the States is well-covered. One wishes that similiarly exhaustive accounts could be formulated of the decision-making processes in Islamabad and Riyadh (and possibly even Kandahar). If bureaucratic inertia played a large part in stimmying a re-evaluation of policy in Washington, did something similar happen elsewhere?There are hints of this and other policy debates and arguements in Steve Coll's account, but are not well-fleshed out. (Also it must be remebered that sometimes these accounts come from self-serving sources - for example, it escapes me why western reporters base so much of their accounts of politics in Pakistan on the accounts of Mushahid Hussain - an oppurtunistic politician par excellence. Steve Coll quotes him here variously as an aide of Benazir Bhutto, a minister in Nawaz Sharif's government and as a journalist. I recall Adrian Levy and Catherine Scott-Clark had done something similar in excellent book on the Paksitani nuclear programme, 'Deception'.) To what extent were the tensions between army chief Gen Musharraf and Nawaz Sharif the result of differing views on Taliban/UBL policy? Owen-Benett Jones in her book on Pakistan seems to have thought it was a significant factor in the tensions that led to the coup. Steve Coll is dismissive of Nawaz Sharif's offer to create a Pakistan commando team to snatch Bin Laden, buying into the Musharraf govt's line that it was an eyewash and simply meant to create a bodyguard for Sharif independent of the army chain of command. One wonders then why when Sharif decided to take the risky step of dismissing Musharaf as the head of the army, his body guard contingent was deployed at a forward base on the border with Afghanistan instead of stationed in Islamabad to protect the PM? Certainly by all accounts the ISI's use of UBL's jihadist training camps to shelter Pakistani militants responsible for sectarian assasinations in Pakistan was a concern for Sharif (see Hassan Abbas' Pakistan's Drift Into Extremism' for more details of the Sharif govts dispute with the ISI over the activties of Jihadists in Pakistan).Anyway, this isn't a criticism of Coll's work as such, which is fairly exhaustive as it is. Its simply pointing out an area of our understanding which still remains nebulous and worthy of study.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    This book is essential reading for anyone interested in the War on Terror or Afghanistan. The list of important people in the beginning of the book is helpful when trying to keep track of all the characters with exotic names. Thoroughly researched, easy to follow, and readable. I highly recommend this book.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    my son is in Afghanistan so this history helped me understand his job
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    This excellent chronicling of the CIA's involvement in Afghanistan from the Soviet invasion through September 10, 2001 is a valuable contribution to understanding the history of our interactions with Islamic Fundamentalists and perhaps more importantly, how and why they came to direct their jihad against the U.S.The 2005 Pulitzer Prize was given to the author for his careful research which included over two hundred interviews, as well as information from the 9/11 Report. Mostly it is a book about missed opportunities, owing, as Coll suggests, to "indifference, lassitude, blindness, paralysis, and commercial greed" that shaped America's foreign policy in Afghanistan and South Asia. In spite of acute awareness of the threat of Islamic fundamentalism, both Bush administrations and in between them, Clinton's, continued to dither: intrabureaucratic disagreements over turfs and strategies, legal concerns, fear of another Desert One disaster, and deference to Pakistan and Saudi Arabia kept their hands tied. Washington was unwilling to threaten its supply of Saudi oil, nor did it want to jeopardize its influence on nuclear stability by angering Pakistan over terrorism. (Pakistan felt it needed jihadist fighters - trained obligingly by bin Laden - to tie down India's army in Kashmir.)Tragically, Washington also declined to give more than token support to Ahmed Shah Massoud - known as "Lion of the Panjshir" - the Tajik guerilla leader in Afghanistan fighting the Taliban and al Qaeda who was assassinated by emissaries of bin Laden on September 9, 2001.As the CIA's threat reporting about bin Laden surged during the spring of 2001, the Bush administration continued to defer action. On September 4, the Bush Cabinet approved a draft of a plan to step up aid to Massoud and to continue to monitor bin Laden with the "stated goal" of eliminating bin Laden and al Qaeda. Funding, however, was not discussed. On September 10, another meeting was called to finalize the "new" policies toward Afghanistan and Pakistan, policies that did not depart in any marked way from those of the Clinton years. The group decided to start with the diplomatic route, urging Mullah Omar to "expel" bin Laden - a strategy that had been tried repeatedly in the past to no avail.Coll's story ends on this day, not in the U.S. but in Pakistan, where Hamid Karzai was preparing to flee for his life. His brother reached him with the news that Ahmed Shah Massoud was dead. "Hamid Karzai reacted in a single, brief sentence, as his brother recalled it: 'What an unlucky country.'" Unlucky indeed.(JAF)To my wife's excellent review, I would add that the book is not just about the CIA's activities before 9-11 [(or that, see "Legacy of Ashes"), but rather about the policies of the entire U.S. government toward Afghanistan, beginning with the Soviet invasion. Importantly, it shows how difficult it is to deal with Islamic regimes - particularly Saudi Arabia and Pakistan - when it comes to our efforts to capture or in some way disable an Islamic enemy of the U.S. No matter how dangerous and downright evil Osama bin Ladin appears to Americans, he just doesn't look that bad to Muslims like the Saudi royal family or Pakistan's ISI. Thus, we get at most begrudging cooperation from each Islamic "ally," if not actual sabotaging of our efforts. (JAB)
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    The title leaves little to the imagination, I suppose. This is a very interesting book, obviously nonfiction but not only reading like a novel, but begging to be fictionalized -- and not as a novel, but as a computer game of an unusual sort.Hopefully it's not too callous of me to say that...
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Very good book and very well written.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Absolutely eye opening. Ghost Wars comes as close as possible to an unbiased, factual description of American foreign policy in the period leading up to 09/11/01. No one, from any party, or any government entity, is left unscathed. Two prescient themes emerged from this book. The trials and tribulations witnessed in the suburban office day to day, where decisions are made based on who toes don't get stepped on and who presents the squeaky wheel to the right person - to a distubing extent extend into the theatre of crucial government decisions. The people who understood the threat of Bin Laden, were not the right people. In fact the Taliban might have been recognized if it weren't for Jay Leno's wife ...(???!!!) ahhhhh celebrities. The other theme that grew throughout the book was the extent to which the American government was operating with a level of ignorance - due to a lack of effort - when it came to all matters on Afghanistan.