Directorate S: The C.I.A. and America’s Secret Wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan Audiobook (Free)

Winner of the 2018 Country wide Book Critics Group Award for Nonfiction

Longlisted for the 2018 Country wide Book Prize for Nonfiction

From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Ghost Wars, the epic and enthralling story of America’s intelligence, military, and diplomatic initiatives to defeat Al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan since 9/11

Ahead of 9/11, america had been carrying out small-scale covert operations in Afghanistan, ostensibly in cooperation, although on the subject of Directorate S: The C.I.A. and America’s Secret Wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan often in immediate opposition, with I.S.We., the Pakistani cleverness agency. As the US was trying to quell extremists, a highly secretive and compartmentalized wing of I.S.I., known as ‘Directorate S,’ was covertly training, arming, and wanting to legitimize the Taliban, to be able to enlarge Pakistan’s sphere of influence. After 9/11, when fifty-nine countries, led by the U. S., deployed troops or provided aid to Afghanistan in an effort to flush out the Taliban and Al Qaeda, the U.S. was collection on an invisible slow-motion collision course with Pakistan.

Today we know that the battle in Afghanistan would falter badly because of military hubris in the highest degrees of the Pentagon, the drain on assets and provocation in the Muslim world caused by the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, and corruption. But more than anything, as Coll makes painfully clear, the war in Afghanistan was doomed because of the failure of america to apprehend the motivations and intentions of I.S.We.’s ‘Directorate S’. This is a swirling and shadowy struggle of historical proportions, which endured over a decade and across both the Bush and Obama administrations, including multiple secret intelligence organizations, a litany of incongruous strategies and techniques, and a large number of players, including a few of the most prominent military and political numbers. A sprawling American tragedy, the battle was an open up clash of hands but also a covert melee of ideas, secrets, and subterranean assault.

Coll excavates this grand battle, which took place away from the gaze from the American community. With unsurpassed expertise, original research, and attention to fine detail, he brings alive a narrative at once vast and elaborate, regional and global, propulsive and painstaking.

This is the definitive explanation of how America had become so badly ensnared within an elaborate, factional, and seemingly interminable conflict in South Asia. Nothing at all significantly less than a forensic study of the non-public and political makes that shape world background, Directorate S is usually an entire masterpiece of both investigative and narrative journalism.