Steve Coll
American journalist and historianWikipedia
8
MENTIONS
7
EPISODES
7
PODCASTS
Search complete. 8 mentions across 7 episodes found for "Steve Coll".
Oct 13, 2026
Jeff KellickHOST
And Jeddah, the big port city, surrendered in December of nineteen twenty-five.
Jeff KellickHOST
The journalist Steve Coll, author of The Bin Ladens, describes the British as hedging, betting on the man they judged to be the future.
Jeff KellickHOST
And in nineteen twenty-seven, Britain recognized his independence.
Jeff KellickHOST
And in nineteen thirty-two, he proclaimed the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.
Mary Louise KellyHOST
What are you reading from here?
Tom BowmanGUEST
This is Steve Coll.
Tom BowmanGUEST
You know him quite well.
Tom BowmanGUEST
He wrote this terrific book called The Achilles Trap, and I highly recommend it to everybody.
speaker_0NARRATOR
Over time, this created a self-fulfilling prophecy whereby the Hamid Karzai government in Afghanistan was hostile to Pakistan and friendly with India, which became further reason for Pakistan to prefer the Taliban.
speaker_0NARRATOR
Steve Coll's book, Directorate S: The CIA and America's Secret Wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan, is named after the branch of Pakistani intelligence charged with relations with the Taliban.
speaker_0NARRATOR
Coll is somewhat more sympathetic than the aforementioned journalist Carlotta Gall is to American policy choices in this regard, arguing that turning a blind eye to Pakistan's support for the Taliban paid real dividends in fighting Al-Qaeda.
speaker_0NARRATOR
One point where Coll and Gall therefore end up disagreeing is on whether Pakistani intelligence was genuinely complicit in Osama bin Laden's presence in their country.
Nathan BrownGUEST
They're hiring lawyers and professionals in all kinds of fields." And so there was a migration of the Brotherhood to Saudi Arabia, and a way in which these two different trends came together, Saudi Islam and Brotherhood Islam.
Martin DeCaroHOST
So I have Steve Coll's book here, Ghost Wars.
Martin DeCaroHOST
To your point, uh, he talks about the importance of the 1970s in the rise of political Islam, and I wanna ask you a question after just sharing a passage here.
Martin DeCaroHOST
He mentions Pakistan, the Jamaat-e-Islami, which was a political Islamist party, how it found a natural and enthusiastic ally for the Wahhabis in Saudi Arabia.
Martin DeCaroHOST
Steve Coll writes, "By the end of the 1970s, Islamic parties like Jamaat had begun to assert themselves across the Muslim world as the corrupt, failing reigns of leftist Arab nationalists led youthful populations to seek a new cleansing politics.
Martin DeCaroHOST
Clandestine, informal, transnational religious networks, such as the Muslim Brotherhood, reinforced the gathering strength of old-line religious parties such as Jamaat.
Martin DeCaroHOST
This was especially true on university campuses, where radical Islamic student wings competed for influence from Cairo to Amman to Kuala Lumpur.
Mary Louise KellyHOST
What are you reading from here?
Tom BowmanCORRESPONDENT
This is Steve Coll.
Tom BowmanCORRESPONDENT
You know him quite well.
Tom BowmanCORRESPONDENT
He wrote this terrific book called The Achilles Trap, and I highly recommend it to everybody.
Peter FrankopanHOST
[laughs]
Lyse DoucetGUEST
And then, but I had to, so I messaged Steve Coll, my dear friend-
Peter FrankopanHOST
Yeah
Lyse DoucetGUEST
... who was in Kabul at the same time as I was, who's, uh, written so many books about-
Maiwand BanayeeGUEST
And then if you leaf through those books, you would see the kind of pictures of Mujahideen looking like today's ISIS and everything.
Maiwand BanayeeGUEST
But at that stage, because even Steve Cole, I mentioned in my book, writing his book, there were only 700 madrasas in that area, the tribal region between Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Maiwand BanayeeGUEST
By the time the Russians were leaving, that had mushroomed 35,000 madrasas.
Maiwand BanayeeGUEST
So a lot of poor kids from villages, they go enroll in that madrasa once they're graduated, and then they either become imam or either become mujahid, take a gun, or just they open up their own madrasa.