The more the United States invested in the Afghan War, the more it seemed as if Washington was holding on to a steering wheel detached from the rest of the car. The main supply lines that kept the war machine humming—bringing fuel, food, and equipment to the rising numbers of troops in Afghanistan—ran through Pakistan. The government in Islamabad could (and did, for as long as seven months at one point) cut off the supplies, leaving convoys of trucks sitting idle between the port of Karachi and various border crossings.

Many CIA officials were skeptical that the United States should try to root out corruption, and advocated that the agency focus on trying to decimate al‑Qaeda and its sympathizers with drone strikes. During the Obama years, they clashed repeatedly with generals and policy makers beguiled by a counterinsurgency doctrine that put a premium on anti-corruption efforts. Despite ample evidence of America’s inconsistent approach, the notion that the U.S. might have no grand policy whatsoever in Afghanistan was difficult to accept for some of the key players, notably Kayani and Karzai.

They chose to fill the void with conspiracy theories. Kayani and other top Pakistani military officials believed that the United States was secretly working with Karzai’s government to bolster India’s influence in Afghanistan as a counterweight to Pakistan. Karzai subscribed to a more elaborate conspiracy: Washington was sending ever more troops to his country to gain a permanent foothold in Central Asia, from which the United States could compete against Russia and China for supremacy in the region—the Great Game redux.

But this was fevered thinking, which was partly what prompted Biden to deliver his blunt message to Karzai in the Arg Palace in 2009. That meeting came at an inflection point: A new administration was taking over, and Biden was skeptical that the Afghanistan project was worth the candle. The American economy was in crisis, and the generals were about to present the inexperienced president-elect with a costly new plan to send in thousands of additional troops.

Biden began openly proposing that Obama chart a different course. If the real problems lay in Pakistan, he asked, then why not instead use the money to keep Pakistan from imploding? At the same time, shouldn’t the U.S. think about working directly with Saudi Arabia and China—traditional allies of Pakistan—to pressure the ISI to finally end its support of the Taliban and other radical groups? Coll suggests that this thinking never gained much traction. Obama went along with the generals’ troop increase, and approved an even larger one at the end of 2009. The question of what to do about Pakistan, the phantom enemy in a failing war, went largely unanswered.

Penguin Press

Coll’s majestic Ghost Wars tracked the CIA’s adventures in Afghanistan from the Soviet invasion, in 1979, through the eve of the September 11 attacks. Reading it was a gut-wrenching experience, with momentum building toward a climactic, dreadful outcome. Reading Directorate S is more like watching a slow-motion video of a truck going off a cliff, frame by agonizing frame. And no semblance of closure ever comes. Coll may have embarked on a full accounting of the war to its end, but history didn’t cooperate. Obama announced a plan in 2014 to conclude America’s combat operations in Afghanistan. By the time his tenure in the White House wound down, the generals had persuaded him to leave thousands of troops in the country indefinitely.