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Book Forum

Directorate S: The CIA and America’s Secret Wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan

(Penguin Press 2018)

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Date and Time
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Location
Hayek Auditorium, Cato Institute
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Featuring
Featuring the author Steve Coll, Dean of the Graduate School of Journalism, Columbia University; with comments by Shuja Nawaz, Founding Director, South Asia Center at the Atlantic Council; moderated by Sahar Khan, Visiting Research Fellow, Defense and Foreign Policy Studies, Cato Institute.

In his new book, Directorate S, author Steve Coll explains how Pakistan’s premier intelligence agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), is partly responsible for the United States’ struggles in neighboring Afghanistan. Coll, a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist, sheds light on Pakistan’s policy of aiding, supplying, and legitimizing the Taliban, a policy President Trump has openly criticized. With an investigator’s precision, Coll also walks readers through the mistakes and misjudgments that have resulted in approximately 140,000 Afghan deaths, along with American casualties in the thousands, and war costs as high as $2 trillion. At the center of the discussion will be the tumultuous U.S.–Pakistan relationship, which continues to define the U.S. war in Afghanistan. Please join us for a lively discussion.