Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan & Bin Laden from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001

by Steve Coll

The replacement government the CIA expected “will be Islamic—possibly strongly fundamentalist, but not as extreme as Iran. . . . We cannot be confident of the new government’s orientation toward the West; at best it will be ambivalent, and at worst it may be actively hostile, especially toward the United States.”4 If Kabul’s next government might be “actively hostile” toward Washington, why didn’t the United States push quickly for political negotiations that could produce a more friendly and stable Afghan regime, as they were being urged to do by Afghan intellectuals and royalists? If Najibullah’s quick collapse was inevitable, as the CIA believed, wasn’t the need for such political mediation more urgent than ever, to help contain Hekmatyar and his international Islamist allies? But the councils of the American government were by now deeply divided on the most basic questions. Gorbachev’s initiative on Afghanistan had neither been anticipated nor carefully reviewed. Individuals and departments pulled in different directions all at once. The CIA and the State Department were much more focused on Gorbachev and the Soviet Union than on Afghanistan. The entire nuclear and political balance of the Cold War seemed suddenly at stake as 1988 passed. Central Asia’s future did not rank high on the priority list by comparison.