Journalist-author shares ghost tales; Coll's reports on bin Laden started long before 9/11

Event promoted in South Bend Tribune,September 30, 2005. Article courtesy of The Tribune.

From the mountains of Afghanistan to covert intelligence agencies in Washington, the renowned investigative journalism of Steve Coll engaged a full auditorium at the University of Notre Dame lecture on Thursday night.

Coll spoke to nearly 400 Notre Dame students, faculty and South Bend residents on themes in his 2005 Pulitzer Prize winning book, "Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001."

Coll, who carries a litany of prestigious journalism awards, recently left a managing editor position at the Washington Post for the New Yorker. True to form, the storyteller held the audience captive through his narrative of the U.S. frustration in confronting a nontraditional enemy, from the best opportunities to capture bin Laden to the complexities of fighting an untraditional enemy.

"What I'm driving at here," Coll said after describing a tense 2000 situation in which Pentagon officials remotely followed Taliban leaders, but could not shoot when they entered a mosque, "is about how difficult it is to defend the values and laws ... against an adversary that recognizes none of those... "We as a nation have not come anywhere near figuring out how those lines come together."

Coll described transition of al-Qaida from physical space to cyberspace, and fielded audience questions on Pakistani military, the potential revival of the Taliban, U.S. disaster preparedness and the present hunt for bin Laden.

Coll amassed his extensive knowledge of this little-known corner of the world while working as the Post's South Asia bureau chief in the early 1990s.

"I knew Afghanistan and Pakistan well ... and I loved that part of the world," Coll said in an interview. "I had these big boxes full of material coming out of the tour."

Coll had thought about pursuing a long-term project, but had put it off until the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

"I was stunned as anyone else that this place that had been so obscure literally came crashing into the center of political life," he said.

Now in his 18th month of lecturing on the book, Coll finds himself heartened by the acute public interest in world affairs, though says he has been surprised by the book's popular appeal.

"It was much more widely received that I thought it would be," Coll said. "I was comfortable with the idea that it would not necessarily be widely read but that it would be a serious study of the history."