 | |
| Author | Steve Coll |
|---|---|
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Non-fiction |
| Publisher | The Penguin Press |
Publication date | December 28, 2004 |
| Media type | Print (hardback and paperback) |
| Pages | 720 |
| ISBN | 1-59420-007-6 |
Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001, abbreviated as Ghost Wars, is a book written by Steve Coll, published in 2004 by Penguin Press. [1] It won the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction. [2]
The book provides an in-depth account of Central Intelligence Agency activity in Afghanistan from the time of the Soviet invasion to the aftermath of attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Coll particularly notes the interplay between the CIA and its counterpart in Pakistan, Inter-Services Intelligence, which used CIA and Saudi Arabian funding to build militant Mujahideen training camps along the Pakistan–Afghanistan border in an effort to create radicalized, militant fighters sourced from many Arab countries to attack the Soviet occupation. Invariably, as Coll shows, this decision had long-lasting effects on the region.
Penguin published a slightly expanded edition in 2005 that added the work of the 9/11 Commission.
In 2011, Coll announced a follow-up to Ghost Wars. When asked about a release date for the book, Coll said "It will take a while. ... I'd like the second volume to hold up over time." [3]
Steve Coll won the 2004 Lionel Gelber Prize for Ghost Wars. [4] The work also received the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction. [2]
Ahmad Shah Massoud was an Afghan politician and military commander. He was a powerful guerrilla commander during the resistance against the Soviet occupation between 1979 and 1989. In the 1990s, he led the government's military wing against rival militias; after the Taliban takeover, he was the leading opposition commander against their regime until his assassination in 2001.
Osama bin Laden was a Saudi-born Islamic dissident and militant leader who was the founder and first general emir of al-Qaeda from 1988 until his death in 2011. Ideologically a pan-Islamist, his group is designated as a terrorist group by the United Nations Security Council, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), the European Union, and various other countries.
Operation Infinite Reach was the codename for American cruise missile strikes on al-Qaeda bases that were launched concurrently across two continents on 20 August 1998. Launched by the U.S. Navy, the strikes hit the al-Shifa pharmaceutical factory in Khartoum, Sudan, and a camp in Khost Province, Afghanistan, in retaliation for al-Qaeda's August 7 bombings of American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, which killed 224 people and injured over 4,000 others. Operation Infinite Reach was the first time the United States acknowledged a preemptive strike against a violent non-state actor.
Howard Phillips Hart was an American Central Intelligence Agency officer. He worked as the CIA chief of station in Islamabad, Pakistan from May 1981 until 1984. He was succeeded by William Piekney in the summer of 1984. He died on April 30, 2017.
The Inter-Services Intelligence is the largest and best-known component of the Pakistani intelligence community. It is responsible for gathering, processing, and analyzing any information from around the world that is deemed relevant to Pakistan's national security. The ISI reports to its director-general and is primarily focused on providing intelligence to the Pakistani government.
Mawlawi Mohammad Yunus Khalis was a mujahideen commander in Afghanistan during the Soviet–Afghan War. His party was called Hezb-i-Islami, the same as Gulbuddin Hekmatyar's party. The two are commonly differentiated as Hezb-e Islami Khalis and Hezb-e-Islami Gulbuddin.
The Afghanistan–Uzbekistan Friendship Bridge is a road–rail bridge across the Oxus River in Central Asia, connecting the town of Hairatan in Afghanistan with the town of Termez in Uzbekistan. It was built by the Soviet Union and opened in 1982 as a military supply route during the Soviet–Afghan War. Today, it is used for trade and travel purposes between the two independent countries.
Gary Charles Schroen was an American intelligence officer who spent 32 years with the Central Intelligence Agency, most notably as a field officer in charge of the initial CIA incursion into Afghanistan in September 2001 to topple the Taliban and destroy Al-Qaeda. He retired as the most decorated CIA officer in history.
Steve Coll is an American journalist, academic and executive.
Shortly after the September 11 attacks, the United States declared the beginning of the war on terror and subsequently led a multinational invasion of Taliban-ruled Afghanistan. The stated goal was to dismantle al-Qaeda, which had executed the attacks under the leadership of Osama bin Laden, and to deny Islamist militants a safe base of operations in Afghanistan by toppling the Taliban government. The United Kingdom was a key ally of the United States, offering support for military action from the start of the invasion preparations. The American military presence in Afghanistan greatly bolstered the Northern Alliance, which had been locked in a losing fight with the Taliban during the Afghan Civil War. Prior to the beginning of the United States' war effort, the Taliban had seized around 85% of Afghanistan's territory as well as the capital city of Kabul, effectively confining the Northern Alliance to Badakhshan Province and smaller surrounding areas. The American-led invasion in October 2001 marked the first phase of what would become the 20-year-long War in Afghanistan.
The 1996–2001 Afghan Civil War took place between the Taliban's conquest of Kabul and their establishing of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan on 27 September 1996, and the US and UK invasion of Afghanistan on 7 October 2001: a period that was part of the Afghan Civil War that had started in 1989, and also part of the war in Afghanistan that had started in 1978.
Afghan Arabs are Arab and other Muslim Islamist mujahideen who came to Afghanistan during and following the Soviet–Afghan War to help fellow Muslims fight Soviets and the pro-Soviet Afghans in the DRA Despite being called "Afghan" they were not from Afghanistan nor legally citizens of Afghanistan.
Operation Cyclone was the code name for the United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) program to arm and finance the Afghan mujahideen in Afghanistan from 1979 to 1992, prior to and during the military intervention by the USSR in support of the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan. The mujahideen were also supported by Britain's MI6, who conducted their own separate covert actions. The program leaned heavily towards supporting militant Islamic groups, including groups with jihadist ties, that were favored by the regime of Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq in neighboring Pakistan, rather than other, less ideological Afghan resistance groups that had also been fighting the Soviet-oriented Democratic Republic of Afghanistan administration since before the Soviet intervention.
The Soviet–Afghan War had an important impact in popular culture in the West, due to its scope, and the great number of countries involved. The Russian-Ukrainian film The 9th Company, for example, became a blockbuster in the former USSR earning millions of dollars and also representing a new trend in Russia in which some domestic films are "drawing Russian audiences away from Hollywood staples." The use of the war in Russian cinema has attracted scholarly attention as well. Some of this attention focuses on comparisons of the conflict with other modern wars in Vietnam and Iraq. Other work focuses on the war and fictional accounts of it in the context of Soviet military culture. Even when not directly portrayed, service in the war is sometimes used as a backstory for Russian characters to explain their combat prowess, such as in the manga and anime series Black Lagoon.
Several sources have alleged that the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) had ties with Osama bin Laden's faction of "Afghan Arab" fighters when it armed Mujahideen groups to fight the Soviet Union during the Soviet–Afghan War.
The Afghanistan conflict began in 1978 and has coincided with several notable operations by the United States (U.S.) Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). The first operation, code-named Operation Cyclone, began in mid-1979, during the Presidency of Jimmy Carter. It financed and eventually supplied weapons to the anti-communist mujahideen guerrillas in Afghanistan following an April 1978 coup by the People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA) and throughout the nearly ten-year military occupation of Afghanistan by the Soviet Union (U.S.S.R.). Carter's successor, Ronald Reagan, supported an expansion of the Reagan Doctrine, which aided the mujahideen along with several other anti-Soviet resistance movements around the world.
There are currently estimated to be 1,500 Russians in Afghanistan, which in this article refers not only to ethnic Russians, but also to any citizens of Russia.
List of works by or about Steve Coll, American journalist.
The following is an outline of the series of events that led up the War in Afghanistan (2001–2021).
The 1979 uprisings in Afghanistan were a series of uprisings against the PDPA-Khalq government of Afghanistan by various Maoist, Islamist and minority groups. These uprisings were supported by many foreign nations such as Iran's new Islamic republic, the United States and Pakistan and were subsequently crushed by the Afghan Army. Many Islamist groups which had been training in exile to overthrow the previous President Daoud Khan saw the opportunity to start a Jihad against the PDPA government. The uprisings would eventually culminate into the Soviet-Afghan War and following civil Wars.
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