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Steve Coll

Directorate S: The C.I.A. and America's Secret Wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan, 2001-2016

Directorate S: The C.I.A. and America's Secret Wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan, 2001-2016

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  • More about Directorate S: The C.I.A. and America's Secret Wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan, 2001-2016


Steve Coll's "The Ghost Wars" is a magisterial account of America's grim involvement in Afghanistan from 2001 to 2016, based on extensive research and interviews. It reveals the tangled web of assumptions, old contacts, favors, and animosities that led to the invasion and the failure to define NATO's mission. The book highlights the devastating consequences of foreign policy decisions and the lives lost in the quagmire.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 784 pages
Publication date: 07 February 2019
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd


Winner of the prestigious National Book Critics Circle Award for Non-Fiction, Spellbinding is a magisterial account of the great tragedy of our age. It is a classic, as recognized by the Evening Standard, which praised it as "in the finest traditions of American investigative journalism." The Times also marveled at its "spectacular" quality, comparing it to the Bourne movies and declaring it "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 that had its own views on the Taliban and Afghanistan's place in a wider competition for influence between Pakistan, India, and China. It 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.

Weight: 542g
Dimension: 198 x 138 x 35 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9780718194499

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