Ghost Wars is a look at the history of Afghanistan from a the early 1980's until 2001. The book describes the Soviet occupation of the country, the birth of radical ideals and the Taliban and the conditions that made it possible for Osama bin Laden to make the country the seat of his power.

An excellent book for anyone interested in the countries history as well as people who want to understand the complities faced be the US and NATO forces currently in Afghanistan. ( )

This is an outstanding account of American policy towards Afghanistan from about 1977 till September 2001 and more specifically about CIA operations within that country and aimed at dealing with the international Jihadists it spawned. Probably the best book of its kind that I have read as the policy debates and decision-making process in the States is well-covered. One wishes that similiarly exhaustive accounts could be formulated of the decision-making processes in Islamabad and Riyadh (and possibly even Kandahar). If bureaucratic inertia played a large part in stimmying a re-evaluation of policy in Washington, did something similar happen elsewhere?

There are hints of this and other policy debates and arguements in Steve Coll's account, but are not well-fleshed out. (Also it must be remebered that sometimes these accounts come from self-serving sources - for example, it escapes me why western reporters base so much of their accounts of politics in Pakistan on the accounts of Mushahid Hussain - an oppurtunistic politician par excellence. Steve Coll quotes him here variously as an aide of Benazir Bhutto, a minister in Nawaz Sharif's government and as a journalist. I recall Adrian Levy and Catherine Scott-Clark had done something similar in excellent book on the Paksitani nuclear programme, 'Deception'.) To what extent were the tensions between army chief Gen Musharraf and Nawaz Sharif the result of differing views on Taliban/UBL policy? Owen-Benett Jones in her book on Pakistan seems to have thought it was a significant factor in the tensions that led to the coup. Steve Coll is dismissive of Nawaz Sharif's offer to create a Pakistan commando team to snatch Bin Laden, buying into the Musharraf govt's line that it was an eyewash and simply meant to create a bodyguard for Sharif independent of the army chain of command. One wonders then why when Sharif decided to take the risky step of dismissing Musharaf as the head of the army, his body guard contingent was deployed at a forward base on the border with Afghanistan instead of stationed in Islamabad to protect the PM? Certainly by all accounts the ISI's use of UBL's jihadist training camps to shelter Pakistani militants responsible for sectarian assasinations in Pakistan was a concern for Sharif (see Hassan Abbas' Pakistan's Drift Into Extremism' for more details of the Sharif govts dispute with the ISI over the activties of Jihadists in Pakistan).

Anyway, this isn't a criticism of Coll's work as such, which is fairly exhaustive as it is. Its simply pointing out an area of our understanding which still remains nebulous and worthy of study. ( )

Very informative

In the early 1980s, a Palestinian ideologue named Abdullah Azzam was coordinating the jihad from Peshawar, near the Afghanistan border. Azzam, who also taught at Islamabad’s International Islamic University, visited America numerous times during the 1980s, urging support for the war in Afghanistan .

Described as a charismatic orator, he told fanciful tales of Islamic warriors not being harmed by Soviet tanks and bullets, and slain martyrs whose corpses did not decay.

Azzam’s Peshawar center was known as the Afghan Bureau. His deputy and financier was a Saudi named Osama bin Laden. Azzam is regarded by many scholars as having laid the ideological groundwork for modern-day jihad. After his assassination in a 1989 bomb blast, bin Laden took over the bureau and developed what would become al-Qaeda.

Was the idealistic 19- or 20-year-old Barack Obama inquiring about the Afghanistan jihad?

Outstanding and detailed "Ghost Wars" is a must read for anyone who truly wishes to understand the underpinnings surrounding the quagmire that the US is currently mired in Afghanstan.