Directorate S Quotes

“They talked disconcertedly about the possibility that they might have to kill the dog while attacking the guerrillas. Then the trucks stopped briefly and the dog decided he had better things to do and jumped out. Cheers erupted in the C.I.A.’s Global Response Center. After the wave of emotion subsided, at least one officer in the room thought to himself: That was weird. The C.I.A. officers named the dog “Lucky.” It turned out to be not an unusual nickname for other Afghan and Pakistani dogs at the sites of drone-launched Hellfire strikes. The animals’ hearing was so acute that they sometimes seemed to detect Predators overhead or picked up the whine of missile launches when humans could not, and then got out of the way.30”
― Steve Coll, Directorate S: The C.I.A. and America's Secret Wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan, 2001-2016

“The hardest thing to let go of was the “myth,” as Sageman began to call it.”
― Steve Coll, Directorate S: The C.I.A. and America's Secret Wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan, 2001-2016

“On May 12, 2011, Bordin published a seventy-page paper titled “A Crisis of Trust and Cultural Incompatibility.” It provided a raw, highly detailed account of estrangement between American and Afghan allies.”
― Steve Coll, Directorate S: The C.I.A. and America's Secret Wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan, 2001-2016

“The title of Bordin’s work signaled his perspective on these and similar cases: “Lethal Incompetence: Studies in Political and Military Decision-Making.”
― Steve Coll, Directorate S: The C.I.A. and America's Secret Wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan, 2001-2016

“just because he was insane doesn’t mean he was stupid.”
― Steve Coll, Directorate S: The C.I.A. and America's Secret Wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan, 2001-2016

“Amal moved into a rented two-story home in Naseem Town, a suburb of Haripur, Pakistan. The area was in Pakistan’s Pashtun-dominated western province of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa,”
― Steve Coll, Directorate S: The C.I.A. and America's Secret Wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan, 2001-2016

“The people of Afghanistan, they are Muslims, and nobody is rejecting Islam here,” he said. “This is very easy for the people of Afghanistan to come together and solve this. America came here for what? They came for women? No. They came for education? No. They came because they were attacked from Afghanistan and they sought security. This is their right. But they should not occupy or interfere with Afghanistan.”
― Steve Coll, Directorate S: The C.I.A. and America's Secret Wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan, 2001-2016

“yet here he was watching an American-led version of “what the Soviets did in Afghanistan.”
― Steve Coll, Directorate S: The C.I.A. and America's Secret Wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan, 2001-2016

“Panetta dined with Pasha and Asif Zardari, Benazir Bhutto’s widow, who shared authority uneasily with the army. Zardari made jokes about I.S.I.’s pervasive surveillance of him—jokes that sounded paranoid but were grounded in fact. “Ahmed knows everything I think and everything I say,” Zardari remarked of the I.S.I. chief sitting near him. “I walk into my office every morning and say, ‘Hello, Ahmed!”
― Steve Coll, Directorate S: The C.I.A. and America's Secret Wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan, 2001-2016