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Steve Coll’s new book, Directorate S, is a massive volume — nearly as long as War and Peace.

Like Tolstoy’s masterpiece, it is a tale of war, truth, family intrigue, high international skullduggery and betrayal — but this time there’s not much love. It is the sequel to the Pulitzer prize-winning Ghost Wars, which was the story of the CIA after the Cold War and its missteps with al Qaeda leading up to the 9/11 attacks.

The narrative spine is the story of the CIA’s mis-steps with Pakistan’s military intelligence service, the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and George W Bush’s global war on terror. It is much more than a story of spooks and terrorists. To date, S is the most comprehensive and illuminating account of the terribly tangled story of Afghanistan, the extremists and the West over the past 20 years. The pulling together of so many disparate angles and sub-plots is first-class journalism — and it is a classic.

More than deception, the book lays bare the depth of self-deception and hubris of western politicians, diplomats and commanders about what they were achieving in Afghanistan. Almost to the end, the American and British generals said that they were winning against the Taliban. Only last month the head of the UK Army, who spent four years in Afghanistan, said he didn’t see the British effort there as a defeat in any way. “We didn’t lose a single battle,” Sir Nick Carter told a public audience.

Britain was one of more than

50 nations which joined the US in hunting down Osama bin Laden and the Taliban regime. The alliance embarked on a haphazard campaign of nation-building as well as counter-terrorism in Afghanistan. Neither mission has been accomplished. Afghanistan is still in the grip of an insurgency, more than a 10th of the country is under Taliban control, and al Qaeda has returned, alongside new elements of its mutation, the so-called Islamic State.

Despite herculean effort, spies, informants and electronic surveillance, the CIA for long periods had no clue where its two antagonists, bin Laden and the Taliban founder Mullah Mohammad Omar, actually were. It took 10 years to track down bin Laden to within a mile of Pakistan’s Sandhurst in Abbottabad. American agents were negotiating with Mullah Omar nearly a year after he had died in a Pakistani hospital.

The relationship between the CIA and Pakistan’s ISI was based on a paradox. The CIA needed the ISI and the Pakistan Army to gain intelligence on the movement and recruitment of Taliban and al Qaeda militants. Yet the ISI was covertly training Taliban from the refugee madrassas inside Pakistan to attack Afghan government and international forces in Afghanistan, including US and British soldiers. It trained and cajoled suicide bombers and guerillas to carry out ambushes with improvised explosive devices.

There is more than a suspicion that ISI officers babysat the bin Laden family in Abbottabad, where they were killed on May 2, 2011. British and American senior officers thought they could handle the ISI and the army command through endless schmoozing and personal contacts. Field Marshal Guthrie, in the case of the British, sought out Pervez Musharraf, the commander-turned-president, on the basis of their friendship at the Royal College of Defence Studies.

Successive American generals worked on his successor as army commander, Ashfaq Kayani. It was to little avail because the two commanders saw backing the ISI, with its grip on the Taliban, as the priority. In time this was to boomerang horribly on the Pakistani forces as the new home-grown Pakistan Taliban, based on the Mehsud and Haqqani clan networks, turned on them and the Pakistani state. The ISI lost its grip on militancy in its own land.

Moreover, the nightmare of local al Qaeda getting hold of Pakistan’s nuclear weaponry very nearly happened — when in September 2014 two renegade officers tried to seize the frigate Zulfiqar, which had a nuclear warhead in its magazine.

The book is almost mind-numbingly detailed, but as the pace of the story gathers the accumulation of incident and analysis is spellbinding. It does for America in Afghanistan what Michael Gordon and Tom Ricks did for the Iraq misadventure in Cobra II and Fiasco. And, like Iraq, Afghanistan’s parable of deceit and violence goes roaring on.

Directorate S: The CIA and America’s Secret Wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan, 2001-2016 by Steve Coll (Allen Lane, £25), buy it here.