The Foreign Service Journal, April 2005

52 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / A P R I L 2 0 0 5 Sowing the Wind Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001 Steve Coll, Penguin Books, 2004 (second edition), $16.00, paperback, 712 pages. R EVIEWED BY R ICHARD M C K EE Pakistani, Saudi and American encouragement of Afghan and foreign mujahedeen (holy warriors) to make the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan too costly to sustain ultimately provid- ed crucial momentum for the later terrorist attacks by Osama bin Laden and his acolytes on all three govern- ments. Pulitzer Prize-winning jour- nalist Steve Coll’s chronicle of this fateful and ironic geostrategic trans- formation, Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden , from the Soviet Invasion to Sept. 10, 2001 , is exhaustively researched, grippingly recounted and deeply insightful. Per its title, the account ends on a date almost as sig- nificant for Afghanistan as the next day was for the United States: the date that Ahmed Shah Massoud, the Tajik Afghan chieftain who resisted the Soviet Army and factional rivals for a generation, was assassinated by bin Laden’s agents. Coll unravels the tangled skein of relationships among the CIA, Saudi Arabia’s General Intelligence Direc- torate and Pakistan’s Directorate of Inter-Services Intelligence. As Coll shows us, each agency pursued com- plementary and competing goals, advanced by calibrated cooperation and covert, discrete links to Afghan fighters. The CIA provided arms to the ISI, which distributed them pri- marily to the Pashtun Afghan factions that posed no challenge to Islamabad. The GID doubled every CIA pay- ment to the mujahedeen, but could not track the flow of funds from offi- cial Saudi proselytizing and charitable groups or individual Saudi believers. And, as we would find out too late, the GID was not the only Saudi paymas- ter in the fray: bin Laden gained pres- tige among Afghans by financing roads and clinics and, once, skirmish- ing with the Soviet forces who finally gave up and left Afghanistan in 1989. Outraged by the corruption of the Saudi regime and the presence of American forces in Saudi Arabia dur- ing the Gulf war, bin Laden shifted his establishment to Sudan, where his minions cut a wide swath and tried to kill CIA station chief Cofer Black. In 1996, after being expelled following U.S. pressure on the Sudanese regime, he returned to Afghanistan (where it appears he still is). Hosted by the Taliban regime and protected by the ISI, bin Laden financed funda- mentalist madrassas (schools) and set up training camps for alienated Muslim youths. Trained as terrorists, they spread around the world. Coll’s solid research, based on hun- dreds of interviews and scores of secondary sources, including KGB archives, undergirds his credibility. He elucidates the political, bureau- cratic and legal factors that influenced such key Washington decisions as whether to give Stinger missiles to the mujahedeen and how to respond to bin Laden-planned attacks on our embassies in East Africa (1998) and the USS Cole (2000). His depictions of figures like Directors of Central Intelligence William Casey and George Tenet; energetic (unidenti- fied) CIA station chiefs in Islama- bad; NSC counterterrorism honcho Richard Clarke; colorful Congress- man Charlie Wilson; FSOs Edmund McWilliams and Peter Thomsen, suc- cessive envoys to the mujahedeen; the generals who led the ISI; and GID Director Prince Turki al-Faisal, all enliven his narrative. I do wish Coll had addressed the weightiest question his work implicit- ly raises: considering the toll inflicted by the 9/11 attacks and the many other bin Laden-inspired terrorist operations in Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and elsewhere, was U.S. aid to the mujahedeen during the 1980s pru- dent? I happen to believe it was worthwhile, for the Afghanistan deba- cle discredited the Soviet leadership and accelerated the fall of the USSR. Nonetheless, the eventual outcome of the insurgency of the Afghan guerril- las and foreign mujahedeen brings a powerful biblical warning to mind: “For they have sown the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind” (Hosea 8:7). Richard McKee, a retired FSO, served in Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. He is B OOKS