Quotes from Steve Coll

America failed during the late 1990s to forge an effective antiterrorism partnership with India, whose regional interests, security resources, and vast Muslim population offered great potential for covert penetrations of Afghanistan.

Nor did the United States have a strategy for engagement, democratization, secular education, and economic development among the peaceful but demoralized majority populations of the Islamic world.

Washington typically coddled undemocratic and corrupt Muslim governments, even as these countries' frustrated middle classes looked increasingly to conservative interpretations of Islam for social values and political ideas. In this way America unnecessarily made easier, to at least a small extent, the work of al Qaeda recruiters.

The Saudi royals were embarrassed by complaints about bin Laden and angry about his antiroyal agitation. Yet Prince Turki and other senior Saudi princes had trouble believing that bin Laden was much of a threat to anyone. They saw him as a misguided rich kid, the black sheep of a prestigious family, a self-important and immature man who would likely be persuaded as he aged to find some sort of peaceful accommodation with his homeland. But bin Laden was stubborn.

the United States constructed its most active regional counterterrorism partnerships with Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, despite evidence that both governments had been penetrated by al Qaeda.

United States willing to confront the royal families of neighboring energy-rich kingdoms such as Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, even when sections of those governments also appeased and nurtured al Qaeda.

Hillary Clinton used a major speech about human rights at the United Nations to single out the Taliban. "Even now the Taliban in Afghanistan are blocking girls from attending schools," Clinton said. The Taliban were harassing those "who would speak out against this injustice." It was the first time that either of the Clintons had seriously criticized the Taliban in public.24

Unwilling to accept the uncertainties and high political costs of a military confrontation with the Taliban, American diplomats also suspended disbelief and lazily embraced Saudi and Pakistani arguments that the Taliban would mature and moderate.

the Taliban's leaders had no idea where this turn in American attitudes had come from. They made little effort to find out. When pressed on the issue of education for girls by the occasional visiting American delegation, they said, "This is God's law," recalled the State Department's Leonard Scensny. "This is the way it's supposed to be. Leave us alone.

C.I.A. had "a culture of insularity." The attitude they projected was "Nobody should tell us what to do. We got it. We are special

GEORGE TENET WAS AWARE of Osama bin Laden. He supported the small bin Laden tracking unit in the Counterterrorist Center. But by the end of 1997, neither the new CIA director nor the agency placed bin Laden very high on their priority lists. The agency's view of bin Laden remained similar to Prince Turki's: He was a blowhard, a dangerous and wealthy egomaniac, and a financier of other radicals, but he was also isolated in Afghanistan.

Outgoing President Bush, who had served briefly as CIA director during the Ford administration, had been the agency's most attentive White House patron in decades. He invited senior clandestine service officers to Christmas parties and to weekends at Camp David. He drew agency analysts and operators into key decision-making meetings.

Hardly anyone in Washington or at Langley yet saw the full significance of bin Laden and al Qaeda. When President Clinton signed Executive Order 12947 on January 23, 1995, imposing sanctions on twelve terrorist groups because of their role in disrupting the Middle East peace process, neither al Qaeda nor bin Laden made the list.31

It was now clear that Yousef and his colleagues had developed their terrorist plans by studying American airline security procedures. "If terrorists operating in this country are similarly methodical, they will identify serious vulnerabilities in the security system for domestic flights." The National Intelligence Estimate made no mention of Osama bin Laden.36

The administration had spent $4.5 billion on the 2001 war in Afghanistan, including $390 million just to replace a bomber, a tanker, two helicopters, and two unmanned aerial vehicles that crashed during operations. Yet the administration would not propose to spend even 10 percent of the war's cost on Afghanistan's recovery or to secure the peace with new Afghan forces.

so deep, "you could have brought the whole of ExxonMobil out there and they wouldn't have been able to operate that thing worth a damn," said Philip J. Carroll Jr., a former president of Shell U.S.A., who was appointed by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld to serve as Paul Bremer's

Major General Douglas Lute to the White House to coordinate support for the dual American war efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan. In time, Lute would become Washington's most important policy adviser on Afghanistan, but in his early days at the White House, he spent at least 90 percent of his time managing the fiasco in Iraq. Lute was among those at the White House who were enthusiastic about the District Assessments project.

As McChrystal took the lay of the land, "I felt like we were high-school students who had wandered into a Mafia-owned bar."34

Zardari mentioned that once, his presidential plane wasn't airworthy and he had an urgent trip to make. "The only person I could call was I.S.I. And I said, 'Ahmed, I'm going to ask for your airplane, but only on one condition, which is that you have to fly with me.

September 11 made plain how the security of ordinary Afghans was connected to the security of ordinary Americans and Europeans.

Yet the failure to solve the riddle of I.S.I. and to stop its covert interference in Afghanistan became, ultimately, the greatest strategic failure of the American war. —

Altogether, the United States handed over to Afghanistan about $900 million of "foreign excess real property"—military hand-me-downs of various kinds—and destroyed another $46 million worth because the items were too sensitive or impractical to transfer. The largest single gift was Camp Leatherneck, the United States Marine base in Helmand, valued at $235 million; the Marines lowered the American flag and flew away in late October.28

McChrystal knew he could not "defeat" the Taliban with the troops available, although it was not clear at this point whether that was truly America's objective.

The Marines were not even under McChrystal's command at this point; they reported directly to Marine leadership at Central Command in Tampa, Florida. The problem of fractured command identified in the last Bush administration review remained almost a year later.8