Steve Coll Interview: Conversations with History; Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley
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[The question of historical context] brings us to your book, which is
not about Iraq but does a magnificent job of bringing together history and
politics and culture and society of a part of the world where Osama bin Laden
arose. The book is called Ghost Wars. 
To follow on what you just said,
one of the dilemmas of journalism is that since it's covering a bead, it's
covering a story, it doesn't always have the time to grapple with the historical
forces at work. You've clearly done that in your book; but for an operating
newspaper that must be harder to do.
Well, it's true. Foreign correspondents are not historians, but if they're working effectively in any theater, they can contribute a first and contemporaneous draft of the themes that historians will eventually be interested in. The most important things that foreign correspondents can do is to be independent, honest witnesses to the structure of political events around them, and to take advantage of their status as an outsider to circle the field with an open mind and with real intellectual honesty, with a determination to ask and ask again and not accept the first draft of responses, and to try to pull that together, make it available to readers, scholars, government analysts, decision makers, and the public in the United States so that they can start to chew over it. That's the thing that journalism can do that nobody else can do: deliver independent, honest, transparent facts to an open society so that an open society can debate their significance.
Now in this case, if you're such a journalist that you like doing that kind of work, you can also go back after the fact and try to answer the questions that it was impossible to answer while you were in the field, because certainly while you're working in the field you're never going to be able to penetrate some of the subjects the way you can if you have the opportunity to go back at them after they've faded into history, and for instance, the principals don't feel so much is at stake in telling the truth.
And so they want to start building a case for history.
They want to start building a case for history, and they also don't feel as if exposure of uncomfortable facts will have immediate consequences to them, the way they often feel when you're out reporting actively on a 24-hour news cycle.
Tell us the history of this book itself. When did you decide to write it? What prepared you to write it? We should tell our audience that this is an account of all the actors, forces, and bureaucracies that coalesce over time to lead and help us understand the events of 9/11. What got you on this track and when did you decide to write it?
Without delivering a long answer, I have to say that it started when I became a foreign correspondent and I was assigned to India and South Asia, and Afghanistan was one of my subjects, as was Pakistan, and for a little more than three years I traveled regularly to Pakistan and Afghanistan.
What years, now?
1989 to 1992, to report for the Post. And while I was out there as a correspondent, one of the big stories on my watch was the CIA's program to aid anti-Soviet, later anti-Communist, rebels in Afghanistan, a program that was notionally secret but pretty well known, at least in its outline, and which was, during the time I was reporting on it, becoming increasingly controversial because it seemed to be promoting radical Islamic groups at the expense of more moderate Afghan groups. The Soviets had gone home, and the United States was trying to decide whether it had interests sufficient to justify staying around and trying to rebuild Afghanistan.
As a newspaper reporter I was around all of these debates and started to chronicle them in the pages of the Post. This galvanized my interest and I became very involved in Afghanistan. I traveled there quite a lot. It's a place apart, a place like no other in the world, and perhaps because it was one of my earliest experiences abroad it just got inside me, and I became very involved in its struggles and wanted to stay with it as a subject. As I finished my reporting tour there I began to try to report more deeply on some of the controversies that I'd chronicled as a newspaper reporter. How did the CIA work? What were the assumptions of American policy? What was the partnership with the Pakistani Intelligence Service like? Why were radical Islamic elements of the resistance seemingly gathering strength at the expense of more moderate elements?
I did some series of articles for the paper then, gathered a lot of files and interviews, even more than the Post could digest in a long investigative series, and fortunately, I was interested enough in this that I boxed them up and then set them aside, and then stayed in touch with the subject matter in ensuing years. I rotated to London, I did transnational reporting about terrorism, al Qaeda, bin Laden in the early nineties. I kept accumulating material. I occasionally thought maybe I should pull this together in some way as a book, and I wrote about it, in part, in a book that I did coming out of South Asia, a sort of political travelogue about South Asia [entitled On the Grand Trunk Road: A Journey into South Asia]. I wrote a little bit about this but I still felt like maybe there was something more to do. And then September 11th happened, and it immediately galvanized my relationship with this material and this history and led me to think I should try to pull something together.
It's hard to do justice to this book. I read it a year ago and I did my underlinings and so on, and I was re-reading it in preparation for this interview and I found that I couldn't stay with my underlinings, that once you become absorbed -- because it is beautifully written, it's a powerful narrative with a cast of characters that are really well drawn. So, I'm going to try to hit some highlights and draw that out of you, what I see as some of the major themes.
One theme here is the importance of history. [While] this story ends up with the bombing of the Twin Towers, its genesis goes back to the last phase of the Cold War, the forces that were set in motion beginning with the Carter administration and his National Security Adviser, Brzezinski.
When the Soviets invaded Afghanistan in 1979, that was the traumatic end to a traumatic year of upheaval in the Islamic world, and it galvanized not only Muslims from North Africa to Southeast Asia in a common cause but it also galvanized the United States, which recognized in Afghanistan a theater where they could challenge the Soviet Union, unlike anything they'd been able to do elsewhere. Brzezinski was, in the Carter administration, the chief visionary of how this policy might be carried out, even before the Soviets invaded, as he watched their proxy client, the Communist Party in Afghanistan, get into trouble during the first months of 1979. You began to think about whether or not the United States, by aiding the resistance to the Soviet-sponsored Communist Party, might begin to roll back Soviet influence in Central Asia and also just embarrass the Soviets in their effort to expand their influence globally.
After the invasion, Brzezinski wrote a memo to President Carter, in the last days of 1979 -- it's now in the public record, a fascinating document. It's quite a discursive note, reflective, and he says in effect, "Mr. President, we have an opportunity here to create a Soviet Vietnam. We shouldn't be too optimistic that we'll succeed because they may well crush the resistance that they face, but we should try. This is a strategic mistake that the Soviet Union has made, they don't make a lot of these mistakes, and we'd better step up and participate." And so he outlined a policy of covert action and overt diplomacy to challenge the Soviet occupation in that note that became the basis of American covert policy in Afghanistan for ten years, through not only the Reagan administration but even the first Bush administration. In that note, he set a frame that the United States worked with for more than a decade.
Another theme that emerges in your book is the continuity of policy, even with the change of administrations. As you've just suggested, this continuity occurs when Reagan comes in, when Casey is named Director of the CIA, and so on. I get the sense that in some ways, when you look at this whole history, it's as if we sometimes over-engage or engage unwisely, a specific example being aiding the Mujahadeen, training them in terrorist tactics, among others, because the goal was to go after the Soviet Union. But then when the Soviets pull out, we pull out. So, there is a kind of ambivalence -- a dilemma that we're not being able to choose wisely the terms upon which we engage, and then we unwisely pull out prematurely. Talk a little about that.
Yes, that's right. One of the ways that that unfolded was that we, from the beginning of our engagement with Afghanistan, never grappled with Afghanistan as a place, Afghanistan as a people, Afghanistan as a polity. We just were there to challenge the Soviet Union. So, we poured in guns and money but we allowed the Pakistanis to shape the political agenda on the frontier, to choose who would be the leaders of the resistance, what methods of assassination, sabotage, and guerrilla war would be acceptable. We essentially supported their agenda and reinforced it without ever understanding or attempting to shape Afghan leadership in the resistance that might be more consonant with Afghan national traditions, more friendly to the United States, and just more sensible all around.
I don't want to become too abstract about it, but we've never been an imperial power and we don't seem to have a national mechanism for engaging in complex societies far away from our own. We have this powerful instinct to pull back, to withdraw behind our oceans, to let the world sort itself out, unless it directly threatens our interests or our shores.
So, in the course, when this decision to withdraw was being made, we had this very interesting debate inside the embassies in Islamabad between the two intelligence services, the United States and Great Britain, and between the diplomatic services of the two countries. The Brits had been the imperial power in Pakistan and Afghanistan. They had had two disastrous wars on Afghan soil but they knew the territory and they had a very confident approach to how you could start to shape and support Afghan political leaders who would be friendlier to the West, who would isolate the bin Ladens and the other Islamic extremists who were beginning to rise when the Soviets pulled out. The Americans would go to these meetings with their British counterparts and listen to them talk about [how] you need to build up the Karzai clan, you need to build up this tribe and that tribe, and there was this American instinct to say, well, that's the new British neo-imperialist seal, you failed out here once before, we don't do that kind of stuff. You know: we were here to challenge the Soviet Union, we're out of here. There was an almost national instinct to not get involved in the complexity of a place like Afghanistan.
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