Journalist Steve Coll discusses his book, "Directorate S" at Politics and Prose on 2/8/18.
Coll, dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University and a staff writer for The New Yorker, won his second Pulitzer for Ghost Wars, a comprehensive account of America’s involvement in Afghanistan before 9/11. His new book continues the story with a detailed look at the country’s post-9/11 military, diplomatic, and intelligence efforts to defeat the Taliban and Al Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan. While many factors contributed to our inability to achieve these goals, as Coll shows, the definitive one was U.S. failure to understand the work of a secret wing within Pakistan’s intelligence agency. Directorate S covertly trained, armed, and worked to legitimize the Taliban, all of which directly contradicted Pakistan’s ostensible support for the U.S. mission and ultimately doomed it. Adding substantially to what we know about our long involvement in South Asia, Coll’s account is both a masterpiece of narrative nonfiction and investigative journalism at its most illuminating.
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Produced by Tom Warren