Some Terrorism With Your Morning Coffee

And you thought I was talking about your kids.  Ha!  JK.

So this looks like a G book but it's actually a B book (read first and recommended by G of course).  Every now and then I get a wild hare and decide to read something out of my fiction/spiritual lane.  My mistake with this one was that it's a billion pages long.  So what I flippantly started back in, oh, November, has taken me this long to finish (what with the Christmas book break and several magazines catching my wandering eye).

Ghost Wars by Steve Coll

Just like the cover says, perhaps the most concise way to describe this book is "The secret history of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet invasion to September 10, 2011."  Coll did his research, I'll say that.  The book chapters follow various CIA leaders and station chiefs, as well as terrorists and Afghan/Pakistani players over the course of the past few decades, and puts the pieces together of the many complex and politically-loaded events that led to 9/11.

For someone like me, who barely grasps international affairs and the myriad of culture clashes that fuels the fire of terrorism, this book helped show that September 11 was not an isolated incident.  It was a goal that had been in the works for years and years.  The CIA knew it, too, but had a helluva time trying to convince the Presidential staffs (Clinton first, then Bush) and those in Congress (again, several administrations) of the importance and significance of what was currently going on in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and what was surely headed for the United States, or at the very least, its citizens abroad.

One of America's main interests in A-stan in the first place was maintaining control over the Soviets during the Cold War.  We watched the Soviet control crumble, and instead of vacating A-stan when the Soviets did, we stayed.  An interesting quote (describing the late 1980's), with the value of hindsight:

"For its part, the CIA's Near East Division, led by the Afghan task force director Frank Anderson, began to argue that the CIAs work in Afghanistan was finished.  The agency should just get out of the country when the Soviets did.  The covert action had been all about challenging Soviet power and aggression; it would be an error to try to convert the program now into some sort of reconstruction project.  There was no way to succeed with such a project, the CIA's Near East officers argued."

So, the Soviets left and America stayed.  The CIA engaged in all sorts of front door and back door handshakes, spent a crazy amount of money, developed new reconnaissance methods, and had several chances to kill UBL.  Which it never took.  America gets a bad rap for being quick to shoot first and ask questions later, but parts of this book really did amaze me, describing our hesitance to take out a known terrorist simply because of some anticipated collateral damage.  Turns out we really do care about not killing innocent bystanders.  Case in point:

"Clinton's national security and intelligence team spent many hours studying satellite photographs of Tarnak's flat-roofed, one-story residential buildings, clustered in several tiny villages behind the compound walls.  At the Pentagon, targeters with the Joint Chiefs of Staff crunched trigonometry equations and blast calculations to determine which of Tarnak's little concrete boxes - no more than sheds, by American standards - would collapse on their inhabitants if one or two or three cruise missiles slammed into the particular house where bin Laden slept.  One of the nearby sheds was a mosque.  Another was a medical clinic.  American military doctrine presumed the sanctity of such buildings.  This was the purpose of the Pentagon's missile math: to determine which available munitions would be most likely to destroy the Tarnak house where bin Laden stayed while knocking down the fewest neighboring houses.  Alone among the world's militaries, the United States had the capacity to ask and answer such questions.  It was also the fist military power in world history whose leaders argued day after day in conference rooms about the mathematical nuances of their destructive power."
(italics mine)

I recommend this book for its well-documented and well-written context of the September 11 attacks.  Coll describes the many sides involved in American politics/diplomacy with care, and because of that I can appreciate the complexity of trying to prevent terrorist attacks and maintain at least working relations with questionable foreign governments.  Especially given that the American political climate changes regularly, every 2-4 years at least.

I'm glad I read this book and now I'm glad I finished it.  If you're looking for me, I'll be watching cartoons the rest of the week.

Enjoy!