Quotes from Steve Coll

Perched on a dust-blown plain at the junction of the White Nile and Blue Nile, Khartoum had once been a British garrison town; its avenues were laid out in the form of the Union Jack.

Doug Lute noted to an interagency meeting that the Taliban appeared to be succeeding with very lean operating funds: "We spend $60 billion a year," Lute remarked. "They need $60 million a year."7

The Coalition Support Funds provided a kind of legal bribery to Pakistan's generals. Musharraf and his lieutenants could use the cash for legitimate military purposes, or they could spread it around as they wished.

Karzai believed that Pakistan should be the main effort of the American war. As Eikenberry once put it to him, "If you had a choice about where to deploy thirty thousand new American troops, you would put five thousand into training Afghan forces, five thousand along the border with Pakistan, and twenty thousand in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas," inside Pakistan.

I liked that they had more balls than I ever did to just stand up and say 'Why' or 'No' or 'I don't care if there is a war on and a massive IED threat. I like watermelon so I'm going to steal a car I can't drive and run a Taliban checkpoint in order to go to the market.

The Americans and their Canadian and European allies were in a hurry to get the Afghan army and police organized, so they could go home. The Afghan soldiers being trained could not withdraw from the challenge of the Taliban, so they were open to local truces and other improvised, even cooperative strategies with the enemy to avoid direct combat.

Clinton's relationship with the CIA during his first term: distant, mutually ill-informed, and strangely nonchalant.

In the absence of more robust American support, Massoud depended on Iran, India, and Russia for weapons, money, and medical aid. Iran was perhaps his most reliable ally. Iranian Revolutionary Guards and intelligence operatives worked in northern Afghanistan alongside Massoud's guerrillas.

Our primary adversary is easy to kill," he added. "He's just very hard to find."31

During the 1980s, across a long, bitter uprising against the Soviet Union, Afghan mujaheddin had not participated in suicide attacks. The mujaheddin's prideful, family-supported ethos of jihad emphasized individual bravery and, where possible, living to fight another day. When the Taliban conquered Afghanistan during the late 1990s, Mullah Mohammad Omar and his commanders did not employ suicide bombers, either.

you can't shoot down an American helicopter with an American plane." He meant that the Pentagon would know how to interfere with the F-16's systems to prevent it from successfully operating air-to-air missiles.

Williams and his researcher marveled morbidly about how incompetent some of these suicide bombers seemed to be. One had strapped on his vest, traveled to say goodbye to his parents, and accidentally detonated his device during the visit, taking his own life and theirs. But when Williams reflected on it, the pattern seemed tragic. Presumably such failures indicated how many suicide bombers recruited to die in Afghanistan might be coerced, naïve, illiterate, young, or disabled.4

Afghans believe that if their country is to be sold to Pakistan they would prefer to bargain over the price directly rather than rely on an agent," meaning the United States, Rubin wrote.17

He told Williams that he appreciated what the United States was trying to do in Afghanistan. "The day you leave, the Taliban will be back," he predicted.

Rosemarie Forsythe's slides for the Management Committee implied that more and more of the world's oil happened to be located in unstable countries, more or less coincidentally. A growing body of academic research suggested that oil production was likely a cause of their instability. E

They had provided insights for the article in the President's Daily Brief received by George W. Bush on August 6, 2001, headlined BIN LADIN DETERMINED TO STRIKE IN US. "It's Bin Laden," Blee insisted to his colleagues. They were still arguing among themselves at 9:03 a.m. when United Airlines Flight 175 struck the World Trade Center's South Tower.6

A few key points were well established. The Taliban imposed two religious taxes, ushr and zakat, on the opium economy. The taxes hit farmers, truckers, morphine makers, and smugglers. The tax rates were 10 and 20 percent, prescribed by the Koran, and so not subject to change. Therefore, as opium growing boomed in the south in 2006 and 2007, it was logical to conclude that the Taliban's coffers had also swelled.

Was it conceivable that Bin Laden could live so close to the army's highest seat of officer education for six years without anyone in uniform or in I.S.I. being aware of his presence? Kayani later insisted that it was the case. The compound was not actually visible from the academy. Pakistanis did not routinely get to know their neighbors in the way that many Americans did, he argued to American visitors.

As Senate investigators later concluded, the events at Tora Bora "forever altered the course of the conflict in Afghanistan and the future of international terrorism.

The potency of Al Qaeda's ideas and tactics further challenged a Pakistani state that was weak, divided, complacent, and complicit about Islamist ideology and violence. These consequences were not fully apparent that December, but they would rapidly metastasize.

At the C.I.A., officers like Chris Wood, who had been working in the country since the fall of 2001, told colleagues that they were confident the Taliban would be back in power by 2017.

The C.I.A. was a flatter, quirkier organization—the agency was part university campus, part mad science lab, part undercover police force, part paranoid internal affairs department, and part militia.

The expiring Bush administration was divided between those "who saw Pakistan as totally lost," as the State Department's David Gordon put it, and those "who had the view that they're complicit, but there's a chance this could turn out better.

Obama was new to Afghanistan but he had personal connections to Pakistan. As a college sophomore in Los Angeles, he had shared an apartment with a Pakistani friend, Hasan Chandoo, a business-minded Shiite from a prosperous Karachi family. Obama visited Pakistan with Chandoo and made other Pakistani friends as he came of age and later entered Harvard Law School.