NERMEEN SHAIKH: The U.S. is intensifying its air war in Afghanistan. Over a recent four-day period, U.S. Air Force B-52s dropped what the Air Force described as a record-setting 24 precision-guided weapons on suspected Taliban targets. The bombings took place in the northeast province of Badakhshan, which shares a border with Pakistan, Tajikistan and China. Meanwhile, U.S. Central Command has announced it is shifting military resources from Iraq and Syria back to Afghanistan, where the United States has been fighting for over 16 years in the longest war in U.S. history. U.S. Air Force Major General James Hecker recently said Afghanistan has “become CENTCOM’s main effort.”

AMY GOODMAN: The news comes after a particularly bloody period in Afghanistan. Last year, the United States said civilian casualties in 2017 had reached a record high in Afghanistan. Meanwhile, about 10,000 of Afghanistan’s security forces reportedly were killed over the past year. Despite the spiraling violence, President Trump recently ruled out negotiations with the Taliban, during a meeting of members of the United Nations Security Council.

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: We’ll also discuss what more we can do to defeat the Taliban. I don’t see any talking taking place. I don’t think we’re prepared to talk right now. It’s a whole different fight over there. They’re killing people left and right. Innocent people are being killed left and right, bombing in the middle of children, in the middle of families, bombing, killing all over Afghanistan. … So, there’s no talking to the Taliban. We don’t want to talk to the Taliban. We’re going to finish what we have to finish. What nobody else has been able to finish, we’re going to be able to do it.

AMY GOODMAN: We turn now to Steve Coll, a journalist who has reported on Afghanistan and the region for the past three decades. In 2005, he won a Pulitzer Prize for his book Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001. Well, now he’s just published a sequel looking at what has happened in Afghanistan since the 9/11 attacks. It’s titled Directorate S: The C.I.A. and America’s Secret Wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Steve Coll is dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University and a staff writer at The New Yorker magazine. He joins us now in our studio.

Welcome back to Democracy Now!

STEVE COLL: Thanks, Amy. Good to be back.

AMY GOODMAN: So, let’s start with your title, Directorate S: The C.I.A. and America’s Secret Wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan. What is Directorate S?

STEVE COLL: So, it’s the covert action arm of the Pakistani intelligence service, the main intelligence service called ISI. And it basically has supported the Taliban and other militant groups to pursue Pakistan’s idea of its foreign policy interests in its neighborhood, or at least the idea of its military, which is really in charge of ISI and Directorate S, and which is, you know, the strongest institution in Pakistan and has ruled the country for many of its years of independence.

And, you know, the CIA knows all about Directorate S, because they worked with them during the 1980s to defeat the Soviet occupation. That’s the story of Ghost Wars. The story here is that after the United States went into Afghanistan, set up a constitutional government, led by Hamid Karzai initially, a few years after that, starting around 2005, Directorate S went back into action, this time not to defeat the Soviets, but to undermine the American project in Afghanistan.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Well, could you say a little bit more, Steve Coll, for our listeners and viewers who don’t know very much about the history of Afghanistan during the Cold War, and of Pakistan—give us a sense of the expansion of Inter-Services Intelligence, Pakistan’s premier intelligence agency. What was it—the scope of it? I mean, now, in Pakistan, it’s come to be known as a state within a state.

STEVE COLL: Yes.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: How did it come to have the proportions it does now, and also influence over Pakistan’s foreign policy?

STEVE COLL: Yeah, well, so, you start with the Army’s influence over Pakistan’s foreign policy which goes all the way back to the 1950s. But the growth of ISI really took place during the 1980s with funding from the CIA and Saudi Arabia to try to help ISI support the Afghan rebels against the Soviet Union in a Cold War proxy fight, right? So, the Soviets invaded Afghanistan in 1979. Afghans rebelled spontaneously against that occupation. Many of them fled to Pakistan. Gradually, Pakistan organized a resistance. And then the CIA and Saudi Arabia came in with billions of dollars. And essentially they contracted ISI to carry out this covert action. And Pakistan insisted on that. They said,”We don’t want a bunch of Americans running around on our frontier. You let us do the work. Give us the funds.” And gradually, they grew into this corrosive force within Pakistan. And they moved beyond supporting groups like the Mujahideen—and, later, the Taliban—into interfering in Pakistani politics, trying to shape media narratives, and essentially become a state within the state.

AMY GOODMAN: So the U.S. and Saudi Arabia provided enormous support for Pakistan and, ultimately, the ISI, over the years.

STEVE COLL: Yes, and directly to ISI, because the main—we had a long-standing alliance with Pakistan, tried to provide, you know, humanitarian aid and so forth, over the decades, but it was the Soviet war that really changed the character of the relationship by bringing ISI’s role in this kind of covert war to the forefront of the alliance.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Well, I mean, there’s—it’s quite remarkable, the shift that happened in U.S. policy vis-à-vis precisely ISI. I mean, they used, as you’ve said, ISI to funnel all these funds and arms to the Mujahideen during the Soviet occupation. But in documents leaked in April 2011 by WikiLeaks, the U.S. government described the ISI as a terrorist organization on par with al-Qaeda and the Taliban. So, could you give us a sense of what accounts for this massive shift?

STEVE COLL: Well, it was the experience of being on the receiving end of ISI covert action after the U.S.-led war to overthrow the Taliban in 2001. So, you know, the Taliban fell in December of 2001. The Bonn Agreement established a new constitutional government in Afghanistan. Hamid Karzai was elected president. A parliament was elected. Afghans came home from abroad. There were a couple of years of relative peace. And then the war started again. And initially, I think, the United States, which was distracted by Iraq, had gone off and invaded Iraq, was trying to turn—the Bush administration was trying to turn the war over to NATO allies. They didn’t really see ISI coming for a while.

But, gradually, the Taliban revived. Gradually, it became apparent to U.S. officials, who would go over and try to study what’s going wrong with this war, that ISI was back in action, that the Taliban were receiving not just physical sanctuary inside Pakistan, but material support, maybe training, that they seemed to be getting more and more sophisticated. They started to attack Afghan forces. They started to attack Canadians and Brits and carrying out terrorist bombings in cities.

And then the U.S. escalated the war, right? So, at the end of the Bush administration and then the first years of the Obama administration, we sent tens of thousands of U.S. combat troops back to Afghanistan to try to finish the war, much as you quoted President Trump saying he was going to do. You know, “This time we’re going to get it done.” And it was at that time—you were quoting this document from 2011—that the Taliban started to strike American soldiers, kill and wound thousands. And U.S. commanders became furious. They said, you know, “We’re giving all this aid to Pakistan, but ISI is supporting groups that are attacking and killing our own soldiers.” And that led to assessments like, well, they’re the enemy, they’re the terrorist organization.

AMY GOODMAN: Before we break, I mean, Afghanistan cannot be looked at in isolation, in so many different ways, but how the U.S. engaging in the Iraq War, what that meant for Afghanistan, the first Bush war? So, can you talk about this moment, when the U.S. is focusing on Afghanistan, and then Donald Rumsfeld, the secretary of defense, prevails upon Tommy Franks to divert attention from that to deal with Iraq?

STEVE COLL: Yeah. There’s a scene in Directorate S where, after the fall of the Taliban, Rumsfeld insists on a light footprint. You know, “I don’t want a big military force there.” But it’s peaceful. There’s a task force. And some American generals come out to set up a kind of peacekeeping and “maybe we’ll chase al-Qaeda” terrorist-hunting operation, just outside of Kabul. And they’re getting themselves organized. They’re called to a conference. This is in 2002. And they go to Europe to this meeting, and they come back, and they say to their comrades, you know, “This war is over. We’re going to Iraq. We’re already going to Iraq.” And this was, you know, months before even the U.S. public first started to get hints that this planning was underway. And, of course, if you’re in the military or you’re in the intelligence services, you know, your career depends on being present at the next big war. So everybody’s attention shifted. And the U.S. basically abandoned Afghanistan in order to carry out the Iraq invasion. And then, of course, we know how well that invasion went, and it bogged down the U.S. for years to come.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to go to break, and then we’ll come back to this discussion. The U.S. bombing Afghanistan, the beginning of it, October 7th, 2001, just weeks after the September 11th attacks. Many in the U.S. would think that those who piloted the planes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were either Afghan or Iraqi. But, in fact, 15 of th