Quotes from Steve Coll

It was like a fingernail on a dead man's hand that kept growing when all other life had ceased.

The hardest thing to let go of was the "myth," as Sageman began to call it.

At the very top of its hierarchy, I.S.I. was a black-and-white organization, fully subject to discipline and accountability, Mullen told colleagues. In the middle the organization started to go gray, fading into heavily compartmented operations that drew upon mid-level officers, civilians, contractors, and retirees. Then there were retired I.S.I. director-generals or senior brigadiers with their own followings among militants.

With apparent sincerity, he added, "No intelligence organization of Pakistan is capable of indoctrinating a man to blow himself up."21

By now a new idea had been identified by both American and Pakistani negotiators, one that might save face. The United States could pay "blood money" to the families of Davis's two victims and the families could choose to forgive him.

Haqqani added that he had "a bone to pick" with Panetta. "You lied." He added, "If you're going to send a Jason Bourne to our country, make sure he has the skills to get out like Jason Bourne," Haqqani added.

Your problem," he once announced to a Pakistani journalist with whom he had become annoyed, "is that you're an elitist, whereas I began my life as a son of a schoolteacher. I sat on a mat on the floor and learned to read and write. . . . We are homespun. We are nationalists. We are not like your Sandhurst friends. Not like Musharraf.

The C.I.A. had identified individuals in the Taliban leadership who claimed to disagree with Mullah Mohammad Omar's policy of providing sanctuary to Bin Laden and Al Qaeda because harboring terrorists deprived the Taliban government—formally known as the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan—of international recognition and aid.

Why is the Army different from the rest of society?" he once asked a visitor. "Training is part of the answer, but there is more. It comes, in the end, from a feeling of responsibility. Young men pick this up, in good schools or in the Army. A lieutenant will say that he wants to repay what he has been given, that he wants to serve. The Army is very different from the rest of the country.

Panetta dined with Pasha and Asif Zardari, Benazir Bhutto's widow, who shared authority uneasily with the army. Zardari made jokes about I.S.I.'s pervasive surveillance of him—jokes that sounded paranoid but were grounded in fact. "Ahmed knows everything I think and everything I say," Zardari remarked of the I.S.I. chief sitting near him. "I walk into my office every morning and say, 'Hello, Ahmed!

Where are they?" he would ask Afghan intelligence counterparts. "Everywhere." "What villages?" "All of them." "When?" "Every day." "What about the mountains?" "In the mountains too."30 The only way to pinpoint Taliban positions was through reconnaissance by force, which meant driving around until "somebody shoots at you

We condemn the Taliban regime," Bush said. "It is not only repressing its own people, it is threatening people everywhere by sponsoring and sheltering and supplying terrorists. By aiding and abetting murder, the Taliban regime is committing murder.

Al Qaeda's brigades in Afghanistan were made up of determined fighters who would be no easy match for Taliban forces.

In Bush's mind, the Taliban were merely the promoters of "a fanatical, barbaric brand of Islam" characterized by the oppression of women and the denial of "the simplest pleasures—singing, clapping, and flying kites.

This was I.S.I. in microcosm: an institution well practiced at manipulating the C.I.A. and the Taliban simultaneously.

Joe Biden had been living on a senator's salary for thirty-six years. He commuted to Washington by train from his family home in Delaware. He had no spare sofas and beds grand enough for such a place when he moved in early in 2009.

yet here he was watching an American-led version of "what the Soviets did in Afghanistan.

the conspirators had completed experiments on potent liquid explosives manufactured from hydrogen peroxide, hexamine, and citric acid. Their formula could disguise a powerful bomb as a colored sports drink, to be detonated by ordinary AA batteries.

month to Massoud and his Islamic guerrilla organization, along with weapons and other supplies. Between 1989 and 1991, Schroen had personally delivered some of the cash. But the aid stopped in December 1991 when the Soviet Union dissolved. The United States government decided it had no further interests in Afghanistan.

Overall, the war left China with considerable latitude in Central Asia, without having made any expenditure of blood, treasure, or reputation.

The title of Bordin's work signaled his perspective on these and similar cases: "Lethal Incompetence: Studies in Political and Military Decision-Making.

During the late 1980s and early 1990s, as allies battling Soviet occupation forces and their Afghan communist proxies, the CIA had pumped cash stipends as high as $200,000 a month to Massoud and his Islamic guerrilla organization, along with weapons and other supplies.

American tolerance of the Taliban was publicly and inextricably linked to the financial goals of an oil corporation.

One view at the highest levels of the U.S. embassy in Kabul by summer's end was that Karzai "was a very clever madman—just because he was insane doesn't mean he was stupid.