Highly informative and engaging | Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden,...

Excellent Book - A Real Page-Turner | Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September ... | Steve Coll

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	• Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September ... Steve Coll Penguin (Non-Classics), 2004 - 738 pages average customer review:based on 136 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Coll collects the pieces of the puzzle that helped create the picture of terrorism from 9/11

The subtitle of this book says it all. If you take nothing else away from this review recognize that. Anything I have to say after that is pretty meaningless by comparison.

The Third World War goes on today. It's not a war in the traditional sense like WWI or II. During World War I and World War II our enemies were unable to cross the Atlantic or Pacific and strike mainland America. Like the attack on Pearl Harbor, 9/11 indicated that we were at war we just didn't know it yet. That war began before September 11, 2001 but that was the first major strike of the war. The Third World War isn't about ideology but about unfinished business in countries where the Soviets and the United States had interests, slights against other countries and religion.

Steve Coll's excellent, well documented book GHOST WARS examines the events leading up to 9/11, how our policy enabled these horrible events to occur, the inability by U.S. analyst to see (or to have people in power listen to them)and miscalculations/lack of involvement in Afghanistan after the Soviet's pulled out allowed the Taliban to take power and isolate those that might have been our allies. In the process, bin Laden rose to power creating his the insidious network of suicide bombers all in pursuit of his jihad.

Colon does an exceptional job of documenting how all this occurred. The research that Coll and Griff Witt did as the background to this fascinating but also terrifying story provides exhaustive detail on how policy makers could bungle the latest threat that the United States and the rest of the world face today.

Coll begins his book going as far back as 1976 during the Carter administration and the seige on the U.S. Embassy in Pakistan and traces the roots of discontent that would bear deadly fruitation in 2001. He connects the dots showing how all of these steps from that seige to the bumbling invasion of Afghanistan and the U.S. support (and abandonment) of anti-Soviet guerrilla commanders in that country when brewed together with foreigners such as bin Laden creating the toxic soup of terrorist activity seen before and since that fateful date in 2001.

Coll's book won the Pultizer Prize and is highly recommended for an exhaustive and fascinating glimpse into the pieces of the puzzle that, when put together, gave us a picture of the murder of innocents, destruction and evil. If politics is war by a different means, than so is terrorism.

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Highly informative and engaging

Exceptional read. In hindsight, one can only imagine what would be if we had taken the left instead of the right (no politics) or not chose certain countries to be part of the end game.

Excellent Book - A Real Page-Turner

I won't bother with a lot of comments. Put it this way, if you want to read one book that explains how we ended up where we are with Islamic extremism, this would be the one. It is real thick and has small type, but you will tear through it. It is excellent.

To what extent did America?s best intelligence analysts grasp the rising threat of Islamist radicalism? Who tried to stop bin Laden and why did they fail? Comprehensively and for the first time, Pulitzer Prize?winning journalist Steve Coll recounts the history of the covert wars in Afghanistan that fueled Islamic militancy and sowed the seeds of the September 11 attacks. Based on scrupulous research and firsthand accounts by key government, intelligence, and military personnel both foreign and American, Coll details the secret history of the CIA?s role in Afghanistan, the rise of the Taliban, the emergence of bin Laden, and the failed efforts by U.S. forces to find and assassinate bin Laden in Afghanistan.

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