Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the Cia, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invas Ion to September 10, 2001

ISBN-13: 9780143034667 / Angielski / Miękka / 2004 / 736 str.

Steve Coll

Opis

Winner of the 2005 Pulitzer Prize

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

To what extent did America's best intelligence analysts grasp the rising thread of Islamist radicalism? Who tried to stop bin Laden and why did they fail? Comprehensively and for the first time, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Steve Coll recounts the history of the covert wars in Afghanistan that fueled Islamic militancy and sowed the seeds of the September 11 attacks. Based on scrupulous research and firsthand accounts by key government, intelligence, and military personnel both foreign and American, Ghost Wars details the secret history of the CIA's role in Afghanistan (including its covert operations against Soviet troops from 1979 to 1989), the rise of the Taliban, the emergence of bin Laden, and the failed efforts by U.S. forces to find and assassinate bin Laden in Afghanistan.

Recenzje

Certainly the finest historical narrative so far on the origins of al Qaeda in the post-Soviet rubble of Afghanistan . . . Ghost Wars provides fresh details and helps explain the motivations behind many crucial decisions. The New York Times Book Review

The CIA itself would be hard put to beat his grasp of global events . . . Deeply satisfying.   The New York Review of Books
 
A well written, authoritative, high-altitude drama with few heroes, many villains, bags of cash, and a tragic ending one that may not have been inevitable.   The Washington Post

Spis treści

List of Maps
Principal Characters

Prologue: Accounts Receivable - September 1996

Part One: Blood Brothers - November 1979 to February 1989

1. We re Going to Die Here

2. Lenin Taught Us

3. Go Raise Hell

4. I Loved Osama

5. Don t Make It Our War

6. Who Is This Massoud?

7. The Terrorists Will Own the World

8. Inshallah, You Will Know My Plans

9. We Won

Part Two: The One-Eyed Man Was King - March 1989 to December 1997

10. Serious Risks

11. A Rogue Elephant

12. We Are in Danger

13. A Friend of Your Enemy

14. Maintain a Prudent Distance

15. A New Generation

16. Slowly, Slowly Sucked into It

17. Dangling the Carrot

18. We Couldn t Indict Him

19. We re Keeping These Stingers

20. Does America Need the CIA?

Part Three: The Distant Enemy - January 1998 to September 10, 2001

21. You Are to Capture Him Alive

22. The Kingdom s Interests

23. We Are at War

24. Let s Just Blow the Thing Up

25. The Manson Family

26. That Unit Disappeared

27. You Crazy White Guys

28. Is There Any Policy?

29. Daring Me to Kill Them

30. What Face Will Omar Show to God?

31. Many Americans Are Going to Die

32. What an Unlucky Country

Notes
Bibliography
Acknowledgements
Index

O autorze

Steve Coll is the author of the Pulitzer Prize winning Ghost Wars and a professor and dean emeritus of the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University, and from 2007 to 2013 was president of the New America Foundation, a public policy institute in Washington, D.C. He is a staff writer for The New Yorker and previously worked for twenty years at The Washington Post, where he received a Pulitzer Prize for explanatory journalism in 1990. He is the author of nine books, including On the Grand Trunk Road, The Bin Ladens, Private Empire, Directorate S., and The Achilles Trap.