Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001 (Pulitzer Prize Winner)

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Penguin, Dec 28, 2004 - Political Science - 736 pages
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Nonfiction • A New York Times bestseller

“The CIA itself would be hard put to beat his grasp of global events . . . Deeply satisfying.” —The New York Review of Books

From the award-winning and bestselling author of Directorate S and The Achilles Trap comes the explosive first-hand account of America's secret history in Afghanistan.

To what extent did America’s best intelligence analysts grasp the rising thread 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, Ghost Wars details the secret history of the CIA’s role in Afghanistan (including its covert operations against Soviet troops from 1979 to 1989), 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.
 

Contents

V
21
VI
38
VII
53
VIII
71
IX
89
X
107
XI
125
XII
147
XXVI
353
XXVII
369
XXVIII
371
XXX
397
XXXI
416
XXXII
438
XXXIII
453
XXXIV
473

XIII
170
XIV
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XV
189
XVI
205
XVII
225
XVIII
240
XIX
257
XXI
266
XXII
280
XXIII
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XXIV
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XXV
336
XXXV
491
XXXVI
509
XXXVII
526
XXXVIII
543
XXXIX
559
XL
574
XLI
585
XLII
589
XLIII
667
XLIV
681
XLV
685
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About the author (2004)

Steve Coll is the author of the Pulitzer Prize–winning Ghost Wars and a professor and dean emeritus of the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University, and from 2007 to 2013 was president of the New America Foundation, a public policy institute in Washington, D.C. He is a staff writer for The New Yorker and previously worked for twenty years at The Washington Post, where he received a Pulitzer Prize for explanatory journalism in 1990. He is the author of nine books, including On the Grand Trunk Road, The Bin Ladens, Private Empire, Directorate S., and The Achilles Trap.

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