Ghost Wars

“Certainly the finest historical narrative so far on the origins of al Qaeda in the post-Soviet rubble of Afghanistan … Ghost Wars provides fresh details and helps explain the motivations behind many crucial decisions.” —The New York Times Book Review“The CIA itself would be hard put to beat his grasp of global events … Deeply satisfying.” —The New York Review of Books   “A well written, authoritative, high-altitude drama with few heroes, many villains, bags of cash, and a tragic ending—one that may not have been inevitable.” —The Washington Post

Steve Coll is the author of the Pulitzer Prize–winning Ghost Wars and a professor and dean emeritus of the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University, and from 2007 to 2013 was president of the New America Foundation, a public policy institute in Washington, D.C. He is a staff writer for The New Yorker and previously worked for twenty years at The Washington Post, where he received a Pulitzer Prize for explanatory journalism in 1990. He is the author of nine books, including On the Grand Trunk Road, The Bin Ladens, Private Empire, Directorate S, and The Achilles Trap.