Steve Coll's latest work, Directorate S: The CIA and America's Secret Wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan, can be seen as a follow-up to his bestselling and critically acclaimed 2004 book Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001.
That earlier publication was a mammoth masterpiece of granular recording about the deep machinations of the United States’ Central Intelligence Agency behind the scenes and below the headlines in Afghanistan in the decades immediately prior to the 9/11 attacks on American soil.
A thread running through Ghost Wars was the saga of the CIA's prickly combination of co-operation and competition with Pakistan's Inter-Service Intelligence, the ISI, a relationship infinitely complicated by the US' dealings with the government and various intelligence agencies of India.
Now, 14 years later, Coll continues the story, and since he is in large part telling the story of the CIA, he's necessarily starting this new volume with that agency's worst black eye and most public failure, despite an entire summer in 2001 in which "it had been obvious from intelligence reporting that something big and bad was coming." At the time of the 9/11 attacks, the Counterterrorism Centre (CTC) director Cofer Black, a CIA veteran of the Africa Division, tried to reassure his staff. "If you remember one thing from this," he tells them, "I'd like it to be that we're the good guys, and we're going to win."
Directorate S, named after a covert wing of the ISI, delivers many different messages, expounds through vast research and reporting on many different themes, but it's hard to imagine even a single reader finishing the book's final page and believing Black's pep talk. The CIA and the CTC are many things in the course of this book's 750 densely written pages, but plain-and-simple "good guys" – the term has no meaning. Ultimately, this is far too nuanced a book for "good guys" or one-dimensional "bad guys" – even Black himself, described by Coll as "theatrical and self-dramatizing," isn't always purely one or the other.
Coll remains a master of carving characters out of heaps of raw data; his pages are crammed with speaking parts, and yet he takes a moment in every case to delineate a quirk or paint a quick portrait. Of Black he writes: “He was the sort of CIA officer one would expect to encounter in an Oliver Stone film.”
Richard Blee, an experienced CIA operative who turns up often in the narrative, is "cerebral and well-informed about international affairs, comfortable working in ambiguous conflict zones". Renowned Afghan guerrilla commander (and ardent bibliophile) Ahmad Shah Massoud, mercurial fitness nut General David Petraeus, glowering neocon mastermind vice president Dick Cheney, crafty Afghanistan president Hamid Karzai, and dozens of others are brought to life in refreshingly multi-layered detail. This is a deeply researched, often groundbreaking contemporary history that reads like the most intelligent of political thrillers.
The story winds its way from the attacks of 9/11 to the escape of Osama bin Laden at the Battle of Tora Bora to the international hunt for Al Qaeda members, always returning to Coll’s main plot, the morphing nature of the ISI itself and its shifting relationship with the Taliban.
The book’s most troubling and potentially controversial later sections trace those shifting relationships into Barack Obama’s White House. The machinations of several Obama key players in the region – centrally and damningly, including the US president himself – come across as the worst possible combination of arrogance and short-sightedness.
The Obama administration’s negotiations with the Taliban – sometimes involving ISI when they shouldn’t and often not involving ISI when they should have – are laid out in unprecedented detail, and although it’s possible to feel Coll doing his best to write approvingly of Obama himself, the sense of avoidable disaster in these chapters is inescapable. No previous writer has come close to this level of comprehensive analysis, however painful or infuriating; all future histories of the US’s long war in Afghanistan will have to start with this book.
As in Ghost Wars, Directorate S has as one of its most maddening main characters the CIA itself, an agency Coll here describes as "part university campus, part mad science lab, part undercover police force, part paranoid internal affairs department, and part militia".
In scheme after scheme, the agency’s left hand often has no idea what its right hand is doing; its budgets and strategies are murky even at the best of times, and Coll can be brutally frank about its leadership. “Mid-level CIA managers could be lazy or cantankerous or stupid or all three. Federal employment rules made it difficult to do anything about poor performers, short of proof of theft or felony violence,” Coll writes, unconvincingly adding, “… They knew their mission mattered.”
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The precise nature of that mission is nearly impossible to discern amid the welter of institutional chaos Coll describes with such halting precision; and the inner workings of ISI (and the larger Pakistani intelligence world), revealed by the journalist at fascinating length, are hardly more encouraging.
Coll seems wary of placing excessive blame on ISI for concealing the whereabouts of bin Laden during his years of hiding in Pakistan (the subject of 2017's excellent The Exile by Cathy Scott-Clark and Adrian Levy), but his reporting casts invaluable new light on the role Directorate S played in shoring up the Taliban and using them as a geopolitical chess piece in a broader game that often placed ISI in opposition to American interests.
Directorate S naturally leaves its story unfinished. Coll wraps up his book with brief mentions of where his key players were all heading when he concluded his reporting, but the larger quagmire is in a seemingly perpetual state of lethal flux, with insurgencies and alliances shimmering into and out of existence like mirages. Readers will wonder what a Steve Coll book on the CIA in Afghanistan in 2032 will have to divulge – and whether or not anyone will still care enough to read it.
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How being social media savvy can improve your well being
Next time when procastinating online remember that you can save thousands on paying for a personal trainer and a gym membership simply by watching YouTube videos and keeping up with the latest health tips and trends.
As social media apps are becoming more and more consumed by health experts and nutritionists who are using it to awareness and encourage patients to engage in physical activity.
Elizabeth Watson, a personal trainer from Stay Fit gym in Abu Dhabi suggests that “individuals can use social media as a means of keeping fit, there are a lot of great exercises you can do and train from experts at home just by watching videos on YouTube”.
Norlyn Torrena, a clinical nutritionist from Burjeel Hospital advises her clients to be more technologically active “most of my clients are so engaged with their phones that I advise them to download applications that offer health related services”.
Torrena said that “most people believe that dieting and keeping fit is boring”.
However, by using social media apps keeping fit means that people are “modern and are kept up to date with the latest heath tips and trends”.
“It can be a guide to a healthy lifestyle and exercise if used in the correct way, so I really encourage my clients to download health applications” said Mrs Torrena.
People can also connect with each other and exchange “tips and notes, it’s extremely healthy and fun”.
Mohammed bin Zayed Majlis
Mohammed bin Zayed Majlis
The biog
Name: Fareed Lafta
Age: 40
From: Baghdad, Iraq
Mission: Promote world peace
Favourite poet: Al Mutanabbi
Role models: His parents
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Venue: Sharjah Cricket Stadium
Date: Sunday, November 25
The specs: 2018 Renault Koleos
Price, base: From Dh77,900
Engine: 2.5L, in-line four-cylinder
Transmission: Continuously variable transmission
Power: 170hp @ 6,000rpm
Torque: 233Nm @ 4,000rpm
Fuel economy, combined: 8.3L / 100km
Two products to make at home
Toilet cleaner
1 cup baking soda
1 cup castile soap
10-20 drops of lemon essential oil (or another oil of your choice)
Method:
1. Mix the baking soda and castile soap until you get a nice consistency.
2. Add the essential oil to the mix.
Air Freshener
100ml water
5 drops of the essential oil of your choice (note: lavender is a nice one for this)
Method:
1. Add water and oil to spray bottle to store.
2. Shake well before use.
Biog:
Age: 34
Favourite superhero: Batman
Favourite sport: anything extreme
Favourite person: Muhammad Ali
The specs: 2018 Nissan 370Z Nismo
The specs: 2018 Nissan 370Z Nismo
Price, base / as tested: Dh182,178
Engine: 3.7-litre V6
Power: 350hp @ 7,400rpm
Torque: 374Nm @ 5,200rpm
Transmission: Seven-speed automatic
Fuel consumption, combined: 10.5L / 100km
Coffee: black death or elixir of life?
It is among the greatest health debates of our time; splashed across newspapers with contradicting headlines - is coffee good for you or not?
Depending on what you read, it is either a cancer-causing, sleep-depriving, stomach ulcer-inducing black death or the secret to long life, cutting the chance of stroke, diabetes and cancer.
The latest research - a study of 8,412 people across the UK who each underwent an MRI heart scan - is intended to put to bed (caffeine allowing) conflicting reports of the pros and cons of consumption.
The study, funded by the British Heart Foundation, contradicted previous findings that it stiffens arteries, putting pressure on the heart and increasing the likelihood of a heart attack or stroke, leading to warnings to cut down.
Numerous studies have recognised the benefits of coffee in cutting oral and esophageal cancer, the risk of a stroke and cirrhosis of the liver.
The benefits are often linked to biologically active compounds including caffeine, flavonoids, lignans, and other polyphenols, which benefit the body. These and othetr coffee compounds regulate genes involved in DNA repair, have anti-inflammatory properties and are associated with lower risk of insulin resistance, which is linked to type-2 diabetes.
But as doctors warn, too much of anything is inadvisable. The British Heart Foundation found the heaviest coffee drinkers in the study were most likely to be men who smoked and drank alcohol regularly.
Excessive amounts of coffee also unsettle the stomach causing or contributing to stomach ulcers. It also stains the teeth over time, hampers absorption of minerals and vitamins like zinc and iron.
It also raises blood pressure, which is largely problematic for people with existing conditions.
So the heaviest drinkers of the black stuff - some in the study had up to 25 cups per day - may want to rein it in.
Rory Reynolds
Jetour T1 specs
Engine: 2-litre turbocharged
Power: 254hp
Torque: 390Nm
Price: From Dh126,000
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UPI facts
More than 2.2 million Indian tourists arrived in UAE in 2023
More than 3.5 million Indians reside in UAE
Indian tourists can make purchases in UAE using rupee accounts in India through QR-code-based UPI real-time payment systems
Indian residents in UAE can use their non-resident NRO and NRE accounts held in Indian banks linked to a UAE mobile number for UPI transactions
UAE currency: the story behind the money in your pockets
TWISTERS
Director: Lee Isaac Chung
Starring: Glen Powell, Daisy Edgar-Jones, Anthony Ramos
Rating: 2.5/5