Directorate S: The C.I.A. and America's Secret Wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan

Directorate S: The C.I.A. and America's Secret Wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan is a non-fiction book published in 2018 by American author and journalist Steve Coll. The book details the uneasy alliance between Pakistan and the United States in the years following the September 11 attacks, and how that alliance caused irreparable damage to America's efforts to fight the Taliban in Afghanistan. It is the follow-up to Coll's 2004 Pulitzer Prize-winning book, Ghost Wars, which detailed the history of Afghanistan from the 1979 Soviet invasion until September 10, 2001. The term "Directorate S" refers to a secret Pakistani intelligence department devoted to helping the Taliban. For Directorate S, Coll was awarded the National Book Critics Circle Award for Non-Fiction.

Through interviews with statesmen, spies, and military personnel on all sides of the conflict, Coll seeks to diagnose the underlying problems that have perpetuated the War in Afghanistan for over seventeen years. Despite sacrificing the lives of 2,400 soldiers and spending upwards of $1 trillion on the conflict, America has failed to live up to its promise to "lift up the people of Afghanistan," as President George W. Bush put it when the U.S. first embarked on "Operation Enduring Freedom" in late 2001. Among the factors exacerbating this seemingly endless conflict, Coll identifies two with particular emphasis: The first was America's uneasy partnership with Hamid Karzai, the man chosen to lead Afghanistan in the wake of the overthrow of the Taliban regime in late 2001. Though the U.S. initially expected Karzai to be a great liberator, even drawing comparisons to Nelson Mandela, his presidency would be marred by a number of scandals related to corruption, nepotism, fraud, and even supposed ties to the Afghan heroin trade.

The second major factor, Coll asserts, was America's assumption that Pakistan would serve as a good-faith ally in the fight against the Taliban. Though it wouldn't require direct military involvement from Pakistan, the U.S. did expect that Pakistan would comply with American requests to allow supply shipments to move through the country without incident, and that the Pakistani Army and Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency work to deter Taliban forces from finding sanctuary within the country's borders. Unfortunately, Pakistan's possession of its own nuclear arsenal meant that America had very little leverage it could use to convince Pakistan to do its bidding. Moreover, fighting the Taliban was not always in Pakistan's best interest. For example, if the Taliban's enemies in Afghanistan—known as the Northern Alliance—were to gain control of the country, they might proceed to slaughter the Pashtuns, an ethnic group allied with Pakistan. Therefore, while America was giving Pakistan hundreds of millions of dollars to fight the Taliban, Pakistan was actively working to undermine those very efforts. Coll calls this "the greatest strategic failure of the American war."



While expecting Pakistan to help without reservation may have always been a lost cause, Coll concludes that disaster could have been averted had the U.S. military not suffered a series of key tactical defeats early on in the war. At battles in Tora Bora and the Shah-i-Kot Valley, lapses in intelligence and inadequate troop deployments allowed key al Qaeda leaders—including Osama bin Laden—to cross over into Pakistan. In addition to the obvious failure of letting the enemy slip away, this resulted in a chain of events that would jeopardize American efforts in Afghanistan for years to come. Pervez Musharraf, then the President of Pakistan, argued that America's failure to contain the terrorist threat in Afghanistan meant his country should receive millions in military aid to handle the influx of Islamic belligerents. At first, the deal seemed to be working out, as Pakistan delivered high-profile arrests of key al Qaeda leaders including Abu Zubaydah and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, both of whom were then detained in the Guantanamo Bay detention camp. However, Coll argues that these early arrests only served to convince the U.S. to place its trust—and its dollars—in Pakistan, later providing cover for Pakistan's covert efforts to assist the Taliban. Moreover, as the U.S. increasingly turned its attention to the war in Iraq, its payments to Pakistan were essentially put on auto-draft, with very little accountability for how those funds were actually used.

Meanwhile, Karzai began to question American motives in Afghanistan, dreaming up elaborate, paranoid conspiracy theories that increasingly viewed the U.S. as an occupying nation bent on using his nation as a pawn in some broader power-grab against China or Russia. In reality, however, that would almost be giving America too much credit. The truth, according to Coll, was that America had no grand strategy for Afghanistan and thus found itself more or less in a holding pattern that lasted throughout most of President Barack Obama's presidency. Despite announcing in 2014 that he planned to draw combat operations to a close in Afghanistan, thousands of troops remained in the country when Obama left the oval office.

According to The New York Times, Directorate S is "a book of surpassing excellence" that is nevertheless destined for irrelevance, due to the ongoing nature of the War in Afghanistan.