The Foreign Service Journal, April 2018

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | APRIL 2018 89 Now at the University of Central Florida as director of the Diplomacy Program, Harriet Elam-Thomas is educating a new generation of potential Foreign Service officers who can but hope for careers as influential and excit- ing as her own. Ambassador (ret.) Ruth A. Davis is chair of the International Women’s Entrepreneur- ial Challenge. During her Foreign Service career, she served as a consular officer overseas in Zaire, Kenya, Japan, Italy and Spain; as consul general in Barcelona; and as U.S. ambassador to Benin. Among many domestic assignments, she served as Director General of the Foreign Service and director of the Foreign Service Institute, where she established the School of Leader- ship and Management. Painful Lessons Learned Slowly Directorate S: The CIA and America’s Secret Wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan Steve Coll, Penguin Press, 2018, $35/hardcover; $18.99/Kindle, 784 pages. Reviewed By Eric Green The critically acclaimed film, “The Post,” presents a flashback to the early 1970s controversy over the Pentagon Papers, a 4,000-page trove of scholarship analyzing the origins and course of the war in Viet- nam, where more than 100,000 American GIs were still fighting. Like the Pentagon Papers, Steve Coll’s Directorate S dives deep on nearly every key aspect of the war in Afghanistan from 2001 to 2016, including regional politics, on-the-ground portraits of American sol- diers and analysis of the Taliban and al- Qaida. For a diplomat, soldier, analyst or citizen seeking to make sense of the drip- feed of news from South Asia, it’s hard to imagine a better resource than this book, which raises uncom- fortable questions about the purpose and prospects of America’s involvement in Afghanistan. The book’s title refers to a unit of the Inter-Services Intelligence branch of Pakistan’s mili- tary that has come to exemplify the con- cept of a “deep state,” a shadowy agency that commits all manner of morally dubious actions in the name of protect- ing national interests. Coll’s central thesis is that the United States never succeeded in developing an Af-Pak strategy that reconciled ISI’s ambiguous status: providing support for the Afghanistan Taliban while simul- taneously partnering with Washington to combat al-Qaida and other terrorist groups. Coll contends that befuddle- ment over how to deal with ISI reflected Washington’s inability to answer the basic question of whether “Afghanistan’s independence and stability was more important than Pakistan’s stability.” In his new book about the United States and Vietnam, Max Boot quotes the Ameri- can counterinsurgency specialist Edward Lansdale as saying: “Perhaps America will never learn the simplicity of fighting a political war.” Counterinsurgency is at best an inexact art form, but over the centuries British, French and Americanmilitaries have learned a few lessons. First, success requires an open- ended time commitment. Second, political, military and diplomatic efforts must align closely. Third, an insurgency enjoying safe haven in a neighboring country is almost impossible to tame without cut- ting off access to the sanctuary. From 9/11 forward, Coll portrays U.S. officials as relearning these truths repeatedly and imperfectly. In recent years, policy makers have faced the fact that reinventing a policy midwar is akin to trying to repair an airplane in flight. At the interstate level, despite a shared interest in fighting terror, mistrust among Washington, Islamabad and Kabul festered and grew, fueled by geopolitical suspicions, personal sleights andmilitary blunders. While the United States sincerely wanted a stable, successful Afghanistan that would not threaten its neighbors, Pakistan felt compelled to hedge its bets given the record of previous superpower attempts to pacify Afghanistan. America’s courting of India, capped by a civil-nuclear agreement effectively blessing India’s status as a nuclear power, only reinforced Pakistan’s suspicions. Meanwhile, from Kabul’s viewpoint, the ISI’s efforts to undermine Afghanistan’s sovereignty—exemplified by support for the Afghan Taliban—were utterly trans- parent. Moreover, Kabul felt that the United States’ unwillingness to force Pakistan to change course showed it was complicit, leading to Afghan President Hamid Coll’s central thesis is that the United States never succeeded in developing an Af-Pak strategy that reconciled ISI’s ambiguous status: providing support for the Afghanistan Taliban while simultaneously partnering with Washington to combat al-Qaida and other terrorist groups.