Quotes from Steve Coll

To enlarge Pakistan's sphere of influence in Afghanistan during the 1990s, Directorate S covertly supplied, armed, trained, and sought to legitimize the Taliban.

As Sageman completed his analysis, the season of Ramadan jumped out of his numbers. The number of insider attacks had approximately tripled during Ramadan, then returned to its previous rate.

A rhyme invented by Russian conscripts went: Afghanistan A wonderland Just drop into a store And you'll be seen no more13

Pervez Musharraf forced I.S.I. director-general Mahmud Ahmed to retire about two hours before the American war began. He did not explain his decision. As to the way ahead, Musharraf told the Americans what they wanted to hear: He was going to "clean up" I.S.I. He appointed Lieutenant General Ehsan ul-Haq as his new spy chief.

Lute believed that no political agreement with the Taliban, if one could be achieved at all, would be sustainable without Pakistan's participation, even though Tayeb Agha had insisted that the Taliban wanted to negotiate independently with the United States, free from I.S.I. pressure.

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

Directorate S seeks to provide a thorough, reliable history of how the C.I.A., I.S.I., and Afghan intelligence agencies influenced the rise of a new war in Afghanistan after the fall of the Taliban, and how that war fostered a revival of Al Qaeda, allied terrorist networks, and, eventually, branches of the Islamic State.

The stakes are high," Musharraf told Bush over a secure telephone. "We are with you." Yet it was obvious from the start that Musharraf saw Afghanistan and Al Qaeda through his own prism. "In almost every conversation we had," Bush recalled, "Musharraf accused India of wrongdoing."12

Musharraf considered the Taliban's emir, Mullah Mohammad Omar, to be a stubborn man with a tenuous grasp of international politics. Negotiating with him, Musharraf had found, was like "banging one's head against the wall.

Musharraf told Wendy Chamberlin at Army House that a postwar government in Afghanistan, in addition to being "pro-Pakistan," should also be "Pashtun dominated."15 For two decades, I.S.I. had tried to control Islamist Pashtun parties to influence Afghan politics; it was not about to stop now.

Massoud doubted they had time. "If President Bush doesn't help us," he told a press conference in Strasbourg a few days later, "then these terrorists will damage the United States and Europe very soon—and it will be too late."5

I'M TIRED OF SWATTING FLIES," President Bush told Condoleezza Rice in the Oval Office that spring after another in a series of briefings about al Qaeda threats. "I want to play offense."13

There were lots of ominous sports metaphors in the fragmentary intercept reports. The score was going to be 200 to nothing. The Olympics were coming.18

Bin Laden taunted them openly. He met near the Pakistan border in early June with Bakr Atiani, a reporter for a Saudi-owned satellite television network. "They said there would be attacks against American and Israeli facilities within the next several weeks

Blood, blood, and destruction, destruction," bin Laden crowed as the tape concluded. "We give you the good news that the forces of Islam are coming."21

Clinton had placed leaders at Langley whom he liked and trusted. Yet the president remained skeptical of the CIA as an institution.

The older I get the harder it is to stay awake during boring presentations.

Mustafa Alhawsawi, a brother of one hijacker, sent them $18,000 via Western Union. He also received by return transfer all the group's leftover funds—about $42,000—when the hijackers wound up their affairs in late August 2001 and prepared to die.

Larry Goodson, an American scholar of Afghanistan, interviewed Taliban leaders along the Pakistan border during this period and found that the movement benefited from "a perception that the Americans would leave, that reconstruction would not succeed, and that Afghanistan would return to chaos.

On patrol, he had sometimes felt that he was just as likely to be shot in the back by an Afghan police officer as to be killed by a Taliban insurgent. There were always a handful of Afghan comrades alongside him who had a hard stare that Bordin felt as hostility.

The Afghans primarily blamed Pakistan. The sanctuary the Taliban enjoyed in Pakistan as they regrouped empowered them. Afghans wondered, reasonably: How could the United States fail to see that I.S.I. was up to its old tricks?

And a new generation of Pakistan Army officers was rising under Musharraf, schooling itself in the arts of "yes, but" with the United States. Among them was Ashfaq Kayani, a mumbling, chain-smoking general who, even more than Musharraf, would shape America's fate in South Asia in the decade to come.

The military-industrial complex was one of Pakistan's binding forces, alongside Islam, national pride, suspicion of India and America, and cricket. One common narrative about Pakistan held that its powerful army competed for power with civilian political families like the Bhuttos and the Sharifs.

For some reason, American officials often measured the reliability of Pakistani military officers by their willingness to drink.)