By Steve Coll, Penguin Press, 757 pages, $35
Steve Coll has written a book of surpassing excellence that is almost certainly destined for irrelevance. The topic is important, the treatment compelling, the conclusions persuasive. Just don’t expect anything to change as a consequence.
The dean of Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism, Coll is a seasoned and accomplished reporter. In 2004, Ghost Wars, his account of conflict in Afghanistan from the 1979 Soviet invasion to the eve of 9/11, earned him a Pulitzer Prize, his second. Directorate S — the title refers to the arm of Pakistani intelligence that covertly supports the Afghan Taliban — is a sequel to that volume, carrying the story up to 2016.
That story is a dispiriting one, abounding in promises from on high, short on concrete results. In December 2001, with Operation Enduring Freedom barely under way, President George W. Bush declared it America’s purpose “to lift up the people of Afghanistan.” Bush vowed that American forces would stay until they finished the job. In December 2017, during a brief visit to Kabul — unannounced because of security concerns — Vice-President Mike Pence affirmed that commitment. “We’re here to stay,” he told a gathering of troops, “until freedom wins.”
Yet mission accomplishment remains nowhere in sight. Over the past year, the Taliban have increased the amount of territory they control. Opium production has reached an all-time high. And corruption continues to plague an Afghan government of doubtful legitimacy and effectiveness. For a war now in its 17th year, the United States has precious little to show, despite having lost over 2,400 of its own soldiers and expending an estimated trillion dollars.
After 9/11, “the United States and its allies went barrelling into Afghanistan,” Coll writes, “because they felt that they had no alternative.” Once in, they were soon plunged into a quagmire. Rarely has a great power undertaken a major military campaign with such a flawed understanding of the challenges ahead. Yet first Bush and then Barack Obama concluded that the United States had no choice but to persist, a view that Donald Trump has now seemingly endorsed.
Drawing on some 550 interviews, Coll describes in granular detail how senior officials, intelligence operatives, diplomats and military officers struggled to comprehend the problem at hand and to devise a solution. A never-ending cycle of policy reviews, surveys and reassessments, along with efforts to find common ground with Afghan and Pakistani counterparts, produced one new strategy after another. None lived up to expectations; in falling short, each created a rationale for trying something a bit different, the Trump administration’s recently announced escalation — a few more troops and lots more bomb ing — offering the latest example.
In each chapter of this very long but engrossing book, Coll takes a deep dive into some particular facet of the conflict. Readers will eavesdrop on contentious policy debates conducted at the highest levels in Washington. They will also accompany soldiers and spooks in the field.
Yet among policymakers and operators alike, the sense of futility is palpable. If Directorate S has a unifying thread, it’s this: Policies formulated on the basis of trial and error aren’t likely to work as long as they fail to take critical factors into account. In Coll’s telling, two such factors in particular stand out.
The first is an absence of trust between Washington and Kabul. The longer the Americans stayed the more difficult it became to persuade Afghans that their presence was helpful and their purposes benign. Over time, Hamid Karzai, the West’s chosen leader of “liberated” Afghanistan, came to see the United States as an occupying power — part of the problem, rather than part of the solution. Karzai believed, not without reason, that United States officials paid lip service to his concerns, were willing to cut deals behind his back and on occasion plotted to replace him with someone more accommodating.
For their part, Americans who dealt regularly with Karzai concluded that he was indecisive, unstable and given to bouts of paranoia. When he first became leader of Afghanistan in December 2001, Washington had celebrated Karzai as an Afghan Mandela. By the time he vacated the premises 13 years later, he had become in American eyes an Afghan Mugabe.
Of even greater significance, in Coll’s view, is Washington’s dysfunctional relationship with the government of Pakistan, or more specifically with the Pakistani Army, which effectively calls the shots on all matters related to internal and external security. Pacifying Afghanistan was always going to pose a challenge. Absent full-throated Pakistani collaboration, it would become next to impossible. The United States needed two things from Pakistan: first, that it would permit supplies bound for coalition forces in landlocked Afghanistan to transit its territory; and second, that it would prevent Al Qaeda and Taliban remnants from using Pakistan as a sanctuary and operating base.
From Washington’s perspective, these expectations, premised on an assumption that Pakistan could be cajoled into complying with America’s purposes in Afghanistan, seemed eminently reasonable. Yet that assumption proved wildly off the mark. While the generals commanding the Pakistani Army and directing the Inter-Services Intelligence made a show of cooperating, they were simultaneously working to undermine coalition military efforts. Imbued with the conviction that Afghanistan is vital to Pakistani national security, they had no intention of allowing the United States to determine its fate. So while accepting subsidies amounting to hundreds of millions of dollars — Washington even elevated Pakistan to the status of “major non-Nato ally” — the Pakistanis still actively supported the Taliban.
Pakistan’s military leaders were playing a double game. United States officials knew they were being had, yet could do little about it. With its own well-established record of having broken promises to Pakistan, Washington was not exactly in a position to call in any markers.
Despite being nominally the superior power, the United States found that it could exert minimal leverage. Officials could ask, but not demand, while Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal limited its susceptibility to threats and sanctions. Although American officials went to almost comic lengths in attempting to befriend or flatter their Pakistani counterparts — Adm Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, called on Pakistan’s army chief no fewer than 27 occasions — such efforts proved to no avail.
In Afghanistan, Pakistan has never ceased to support the very enemy that the United States and allied forces have been struggling to defeat. Its army and intelligence service remained throughout “an incubator and enabler of extremism.” Coll concludes that Washington’s inability “to solve the riddle” of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence and “to stop its covert interference in Afghanistan” constituted the “greatest strategic failure of the American war.”
“I believe victory is closer than ever before.” The words are Mike Pence’s, uttered during his recent trip to Kabul, but the sentiment is one that any number of high-ranking American officials, civilian and military alike, have expressed over the years. Readers of Directorate S will find no reason to take such assurances seriously. No matter: The Afghanistan war will no doubt continue on its endless course.
–New York Times News Service
Andrew J. Bacevich is the author, most recently, of America’s War for the Greater Middle East: A Military History.
