Steve Coll. Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001. 2004.

“Reagan later told William F. Buckley, 'My problem with Bill was that I didn't understand him at meetings.... So I'd just nod my head, but I didn't know what he was actually saying.' Such was the dialogue for six years between the president and his intelligence chief in a nuclear-armed nation running secret wars on four continents.” (96-97)

It's a pleasure to read such a well put-together book, with solid, almost flawlessly lucid writing, maps, an index, and, usefully, an index of many of the recurring names. I even appreciate that there are no photo plates to cheapen the precise, if numbing, six hundred pages of secret history of the Afghanistan Wars. I feel lucky that I was able to follow it, and grateful to have read it. The truth is multilayered, and adjacent layers contradict each other. If you believe the official right wing story, Osama bin Laden came out of thin air to launch an unprovoked attack on 9-11. If you peel off the next layer, you get the Michael Moore version that implies that Osama bin Laden and George W. Bush are conspiring against the American people. It takes hundreds of pages and lots of footnotes to peel the onion.

Here's some facts from this book that contradict rumors I've heard:

The CIA did not have any direct contact with Osama bin Laden at any point, even when Osama was, indirectly, a CIA client in the mujahaddin. If they did, the secret was well-kept.

The U.S. did not turn down an offer from Sudan to turn over Osama in the mid-1990's (though Saudi Arabia might have), and at that time Osama had not yet launched any attack against U.S. targets

Osama bin Laden was not behind the first World Trade Center Bombing, though there may have been one degree of separation.

The Clinton administration, as Richard Clarke assures us, was all about capturing or killing Osama bin Laden, but was deterred by the risk of civilian casualties or alienating the international community (and Islamic community, among them fundamentalist terrorists) by launching attacks in countries that were not our declared enemy. Well? George W. Bush had no qualms about civilian casualties or alienating anybody, and he hasn't been any more successful than Clinton.

Osama bin Laden did make an effort to communicate with Saddam Hussein in the 1990s, though they were not co-conspriators. (I made this note while reading but afterward, after using the index to search the book, I could not find mention of this. Better note-taking on my part would help, though it might preclude reading in bed.)

The author seems to stick to the facts, derived from exhaustive research, though near the end of the book he does offer us his two cents about American foreign policy: "Indifference, lassitude, blindness, paralysis, commercial greed.... Washington coddled undemocratic and corrupt Muslim governments." (570-571) At times during the journey through these dense paragraphs I worried about what the last sentence could possibly be, but Coll nailed it. In the words of Hamid Karzai: "What an unlucky country."