Directorate S: the C.I.A. and America's secret wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan 2001–2016
2018; Oxford University Press; Volume: 94; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1093/ia/iiy089
ISSN1468-2346
Autores Tópico(s)Military History and Strategy
Resumo'Can someone remind me why we are in Afghanistan?' asked Condoleezza Rice, the US Secretary of State, during her trip to London in February 2008. It was doubtless meant as a rhetorical device to get the official discussions under way, but it led to some contorted explanations. It did not feel convincing. Few books have left me feeling as uncomfortable as Steve Coll's Directorate S. For this is an account of lost opportunities. It is a 'humbling case-study of the limits of American power' (p. 666) but, more than that, it is a story of courage and dedication mixed with folly, vanity, deceit and duplicity. As someone involved in Afghanistan since 1993, I approached Coll's weighty tome with some scepticism. In the early chapters, I noticed some errors of fact and a few notable omissions—such as the escape of Taliban fighters from Kunduz in November 2001. There was also obscurity on sourcing; too often the footnotes relate to undated interviews. Likewise, I am suspicious of passages inside quotation marks based on participants' recollections. While it helps give the book the buzz of a Tom Clancy novel, it is ethically questionable. However, as I progressed into the middle chapters, I recognized that Coll provides an accurate and enthralling account of the Afghan imbroglio. In particular, I recognized the personalities of some of the key players such as the Afghan President Hamid Karzai and the Pakistani Army Chief Ashfaq Kayani. Furthermore, Coll capably describes the extraordinary complexity of the issues with which the United States and its allies wrestled and which they, for the most part, failed to solve.
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