Hello, I am looking for someone to write an essay on Steve Coll's Ghost Wars. It needs to be at least 1750 words.Download file to see previous pages... Nonetheless, despite their efforts, CIA agents c

Hello, I am looking for someone to write an essay on Steve Coll's Ghost Wars. It needs to be at least 1750 words.

Nonetheless, despite their efforts, CIA agents continually failed in their chase. Significant reasons led to their failure, including a lack f communication amongst the several groups searching for Laden, and issues regarding policy which made one groups' interest conflict or seek approval from another.

In Ghost Wars, Coll describes the single best opportunity - one missed in 1999 - to decapitate al Qaeda, when spies paid by the U.S. reported that Osama bin Laden was in a mountain camp, hunting with Arab friends for the elusive bustard. But when aerial surveillance revealed the possible presence f Saudi royals and princes f the United Arab Emirates in the camp, President Clinton's national security council called off the strike for fear f hurting relations with those countries in case f collateral damage.

The Americans had no interest in Afghanistan until the Soviet invasion in 1979, the point where Coll's book begins. Ghost Wars traces how the CIA decided to throw its support behind anti-Soviet rebels to create a costly and protracted war for the U.S.S.R., not unlike Vietnam, that would eventually bring down the regime. The U.S., ignorant f the history, languages and people f the region, funneled its covert assistance through Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. When the Soviets left, the CIA withdrew and allowed these two countries to build up the Islamist Taliban regime that fostered and protected al Qaeda.

"The State Department warned that Afghanistan risked becoming a lawless state, a fulcrum for drug and arms trafficking, but they were not listened to by the military," says Coll, who documents throughout his book the hostility between these two agencies. "The only voices in the Clinton government against the Taliban, the only opposition, came from the feminists, to their great credit."

When the CIA finally returned to Afghanistan in 1998 to try to stop bin Laden. It tried what Coll calls the Hollywood approach - ride into town, take out the bad guy and leave. The failure f the agency's tactics, heavily reliant on satellite surveillance, is chronicled in the third section f the book, which ends the day before 9/11.

"United States policy in the region was shaped by indifference, passivity and inattention as much as by connivance," says Coll. He was the South Asia bureau chief for the Washington Post from 1989 to '91, when the Twin Towers terror could have been averted if only the U.S. had thrown its backing to Ahmed Shah Massoud, who might have built a coalition f local tribes and factions needed to build democracy.

"He could see the big picture," says Coll f Massoud, whom he had interviewed when he was in South Asia.

"He was a charismatic leader f the Northern Alliance in the Pandjir Valley and he recognized that the bin Laden problem could not be solved by one cruise missile but in the context f the Taliban and the support it was receiving from Pakistan. The Taliban was a clandestine instrument f Pakistani rule in Afghanistan."

Massoud, however, couldn't get President Clinton's attention.