"We stood by while this happened"

Author Steve Coll discusses "Ghost Wars," his new book about how the U.S. abandoned Afghanistan, tried to work with the Taliban, and failed to stop Osama bin Laden -- even though terrified CIA agents knew he was about to strike.

By Suzy Hansen

Mar 3, 2004 | One chapter in Steve Coll's new book, "Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and bin Laden, From the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001," is called, curiously, "The Manson Family." The chapter takes place in early 1999, a time when, according to Coll, CIA director George Tenet "did not describe bin Laden as the gravest, most important threat faced by the United States." Within the CIA's 25-member bin Laden unit, however -- nicknamed "the Manson family" -- the attitude toward the shady Saudi-born terrorist leader was quite different. So cultish were they about their suspicion of al-Qaida, they were considered "alarmist." The Manson family made their other CIA colleagues "uncomfortable."

But as Coll dramatically draws out, two years later, by the summer of 2001, the Manson family enjoyed many more sympathizers within the CIA Counterterrorist Center. By then, "they worked long hours, exchanging Arabic translations across the office partitions, frequently 'with a panic-stricken look' in their eyes." One officer in "Ghost Wars" remembers them telling one another, "We're going to miss stuff. We are missing stuff. We can't keep up."

It's these kinds of details that make "Ghost Wars" such a terrifying, and substantive, book. Beginning in 1979 and ending just days before Sept. 11, "Ghost Wars" follows various stories -- the CIA's relationship with the Afghans during the Cold War, the slow development of its understanding of bin Laden and al-Qaida, and the U.S. relationship with Ahmed Massoud, the Afghan resistance leader. In the end, Coll offers a surprisingly cohesive narrative of the makings of Sept. 11, 2001. Considering the United States' long and tangled history with Afghanistan, and more generally, Islamic terrorism, he has no easy answers to the question that still rankles the world: How could Sept. 11 possibly have happened?

Coll, who is now the managing editor of the Washington Post, spoke to Salon by phone from his office in Washington.

Your book details the CIA's relationship with Afghanistan throughout the 1980s, when the United States was arming the mujahedin against the Soviets. Since Sept. 11, we've heard a lot about how our abandonment of Afghanistan led to the rise of the Taliban and the empowerment of Osama bin Laden. What was the U.S. attitude toward Afghanistan during this crucial period in the early 1990s?

It began as a fairly sharp debate between the CIA and the State Department over whether it was worthwhile to hang in there. It sort of ended with a whimper. Initially, it was all very complicated because after the Soviets left they continued to support a communist Afghan government led by President Najibullah. Cold War hard-liners in Washington suspected that the Soviets didn't really intend to withdraw from Afghanistan, and that they were going to use this government as a proxy.

So in Washington people couldn't make up their minds about whether it was time to turn to politics or whether to continue to prosecute the war. The Afghan factions that we supported felt strongly that Najibullah had to go. The United Nations, meanwhile, was trying to negotiate a peaceful transition, and the State Department was interested in participating. The CIA thought it was a doomed project -- they didn't see any American interests worth the risks involved in getting involved in Afghan politics.

This begins in 1989 and ends around 1992. Think back to that time. It's this very fast-moving and epochal moment in American history. The Berlin Wall falls in November of 1989, the coup against Gorbachev occurs in August of 1990, and the Soviet Union collapses altogether in December of 1991. So the reason I say it goes out with a whimper is because, in the end, the events in Europe and the Soviet Union were so momentous and so overwhelming for Washington that there was just no room for an issue like Afghanistan. The whole future of the global balance of power was in motion and Europe was being remade and the nuclear standoff was being torn down and everything was new. The complicated and seemingly intractable violence of Afghanistan's civil war just fell off everyone's list.

Right, and was this the same within the CIA. Or was anyone in the agency upset about this?

Most people in the CIA had the view that our work was done in Afghanistan. We went in there to drive the Soviets out, and we succeeded gloriously. We not only drove them out but we contributed to the collapse of Soviet communism, and we should not delude ourselves into thinking that we could do anything more in that part of that world. The State Department tended to argue passionately that we did have interests, even in a post-Soviet Afghanistan, that we had interests beyond humanitarian ones, that we needed to manage the political situation there so that it didn't turn against us. And they basically lost the argument over the years.

At that point there was no American ambassador or CIA chief in Afghanistan, correct? And that was true until ...

Until after the fall of the Taliban in November or December of 2001.

That long. And meanwhile -- and this is one of the most important parts of your book -- we had encouraged the relationship between the Afghans and the Saudis, and the Afghans and the Pakistanis. Were they still supporting different factions within Afghanistan throughout the 1990s?

They were. For Saudi Arabia and Pakistan the conflict continued to be important, even in the years it wasn't for us. For them it was a regional conflict involving sectarian struggles between orthodox Sunni Islamists in Saudi Arabia and the Shiite government in Iran, between struggles to influence the new Central Asia that had opened up with the collapse of Soviet communism. If you lived in the neighborhood and you looked at Afghanistan, you saw a lot at stake. The Saudis and Pakistanis, and to some extent the Iranians, continued to pour money and weaponry into their favorite factions and that caused the war to intensify and continue.

So at the time Bill Clinton was elected president in 1992, Afghanistan was a mess.

It was a real crisis. The war was violent and seemingly intractable, the humanitarian situation was terrible, and efforts to intervene through diplomatic negotiations were languishing.

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