Ghost Wars
Hi, everybody, I thought I would start off the post on Ghost Wars. I did skip the hundred pages in the middle so that I could find out what happened in the years leading up to 9/11, but I wanted to get these questions on paper before I obsessed about them anymore.
One of the books that I had to read for my orals was a book by David Trotter on the social and historical context of the British novel between 1880-1918. He had an entire chapter devoted to the "secret agent." We're not talking just Joseph Conrad, but a line from Charles Dickens' The Tale of Two Cities, where the terrorists were the French (the origin of the moniker "terrorist") through John Buchan's novels, where shiny young elite British men in exotic locales "fell" into the spy business, which really only began around that time. This is also the time when Decadence flourished and Bram Stoker's Dracula was a best-seller, and the spy novel shared the same pre-occupation with shadowy mobile populations contaminating the core of civilization, a contamination that could only be cleansed through superior British morality. This theme corresponded to the feeling that with the evolution of a public sphere, with varying degrees of democracy, you lost the complete transparency of politics under a monarchy and had to deal with unpredictable demographic agencies that had to be moralized out of their irrational, primitivist, anarchist impulses. The civilizing mission at home. So the spy didn't need any particular training; you had the "gentleman spy." On the other hand, those unpredictable demographic agencies would have self-destructed anyway -- the gentleman spy just eased that process along.
What I was struck by in reading Ghost Wars, from a completely non-specialist point of view, was how similar the current situation was to that earlier time. Since Coll is a journalist and not a political scientist, I was not expecting any prescriptive statements to come out of the book, but I kind of wish they had -- I just couldn't sleep while I was reading this book. Ghost Wars gives us a vivid portrait of the personalities behind the US efforts in Afghanistan and Pakistan, in particular through the CIA, but what was eye-opening to me was that the decisions that were made were not based on intelligence but on personalities. Most of the CIA agents who were based in Pakistan put a lot of misplaced trust in the Pakistani secret service, their "relationships" with individual generals -- I say "most" because Coll also gives us the views of the CIA agents who had clandestinely investigated the Afghan situation for themselves and disagreed with the official CIA policy. The book also gives the impression that the CIA culture itself is strongly prejudiced against people from the Northeast who are viewed as cerebral and liberal and not serious enough for the business of war, and that the CIA preferred cowboys in the agency and in Congress. It seems that could only hurt them, and more importantly, hurt us as a country.
One of the key advantages of the CIA that comes through in the book is its enormous flexibility, at least in comparison with the military. I'm thinking of the example that they give of the Predator drone experiment. This flexibility is what makes it adaptable to the post-Cold War situation. But on the other hand, in order to be flexible and innovative, the agency needed more discretionary income, so to speak, and the freedom to use it as needed without bureaucracy. I would be more in favor of this increased flexibility if I didn't know about all those personalities and prejudices Coll outlined within the agency. That pesky bureaucracy is in place so that the government can be held accountable for what it does, and I should hope that's what distinguishes us as a democracy. Is democracy a transparent representation of the people? Is democracy compatible with this "ghost war" that compels our engagement?
One of the strongest features of the book was that it illustrated all of the different Islams and Arabic identities that come into play. It showed how the US missed the boat by not being able to support more secular tendencies in the Middle East and by virtually throwing huge volumes of weapons into the world market. It also gives the lie to Samuel Huntington's idiotic Clash of the Civilizations argument.
So, again, this book was fascinating and stirred up all kinds of questions. I'm looking forward to hearing what you thought about the book.
One of the books that I had to read for my orals was a book by David Trotter on the social and historical context of the British novel between 1880-1918. He had an entire chapter devoted to the "secret agent." We're not talking just Joseph Conrad, but a line from Charles Dickens' The Tale of Two Cities, where the terrorists were the French (the origin of the moniker "terrorist") through John Buchan's novels, where shiny young elite British men in exotic locales "fell" into the spy business, which really only began around that time. This is also the time when Decadence flourished and Bram Stoker's Dracula was a best-seller, and the spy novel shared the same pre-occupation with shadowy mobile populations contaminating the core of civilization, a contamination that could only be cleansed through superior British morality. This theme corresponded to the feeling that with the evolution of a public sphere, with varying degrees of democracy, you lost the complete transparency of politics under a monarchy and had to deal with unpredictable demographic agencies that had to be moralized out of their irrational, primitivist, anarchist impulses. The civilizing mission at home. So the spy didn't need any particular training; you had the "gentleman spy." On the other hand, those unpredictable demographic agencies would have self-destructed anyway -- the gentleman spy just eased that process along.
What I was struck by in reading Ghost Wars, from a completely non-specialist point of view, was how similar the current situation was to that earlier time. Since Coll is a journalist and not a political scientist, I was not expecting any prescriptive statements to come out of the book, but I kind of wish they had -- I just couldn't sleep while I was reading this book. Ghost Wars gives us a vivid portrait of the personalities behind the US efforts in Afghanistan and Pakistan, in particular through the CIA, but what was eye-opening to me was that the decisions that were made were not based on intelligence but on personalities. Most of the CIA agents who were based in Pakistan put a lot of misplaced trust in the Pakistani secret service, their "relationships" with individual generals -- I say "most" because Coll also gives us the views of the CIA agents who had clandestinely investigated the Afghan situation for themselves and disagreed with the official CIA policy. The book also gives the impression that the CIA culture itself is strongly prejudiced against people from the Northeast who are viewed as cerebral and liberal and not serious enough for the business of war, and that the CIA preferred cowboys in the agency and in Congress. It seems that could only hurt them, and more importantly, hurt us as a country.
One of the key advantages of the CIA that comes through in the book is its enormous flexibility, at least in comparison with the military. I'm thinking of the example that they give of the Predator drone experiment. This flexibility is what makes it adaptable to the post-Cold War situation. But on the other hand, in order to be flexible and innovative, the agency needed more discretionary income, so to speak, and the freedom to use it as needed without bureaucracy. I would be more in favor of this increased flexibility if I didn't know about all those personalities and prejudices Coll outlined within the agency. That pesky bureaucracy is in place so that the government can be held accountable for what it does, and I should hope that's what distinguishes us as a democracy. Is democracy a transparent representation of the people? Is democracy compatible with this "ghost war" that compels our engagement?
One of the strongest features of the book was that it illustrated all of the different Islams and Arabic identities that come into play. It showed how the US missed the boat by not being able to support more secular tendencies in the Middle East and by virtually throwing huge volumes of weapons into the world market. It also gives the lie to Samuel Huntington's idiotic Clash of the Civilizations argument.
So, again, this book was fascinating and stirred up all kinds of questions. I'm looking forward to hearing what you thought about the book.
posted by Jeannie | 8:33 AM
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