Bruce Riedel's "The Search for al Qaeda"

This is a fairly good book that covers the history of al Qaeda with chapters on the 9/11 attack, the main characters (Osama bin Laden, Ayman Zawahiri, Mullah Omar, and Abu Mussib al Zarqawi), a review of al Qaeda's plans (which I found to be weak), and a final chapter on "how to defeat al Qaeda" (that I found simplistic and far short of convincing).

Riedel is an ex-CIA guy who was high in the organization and a senior advisor to three presidents on Middle East and South Asia. So this is an insider's account. It is well informed and clearly written.

I do note that Riedel is a right winger. He mentions Mike Huckabee twice in the first chapter. He lets it show that he feels the CIA should be doing secret executions to advance US policy. So he is not a "nice guy". My viewpoint is that the CIA is a rogue organization. Kennedy discovered that when the CIA promised to deliver a coup in Cuba and instead smeared a mess all over Kennedy's face with a completely botched Bay of Pigs landing. Kennedy wanted to destroy the CIA but lost the battle. (Just like a bunch of presidents lost the battle to oust J. Edgar Hoover from the FBI but failed because Hoover had too much dirt on them, so they left Hoover to do his "red hunting" and harrassment of civil rights groups, and the hounding of poor Martin Luther King.)

He does make sniping remarks at Bush's policies. He was not impressed with the unnecessary war in Iraq. He is appalled that the US has not cornered and captured/killed Osama bin Laden. He finds it unacceptable that there is no clear line of authority with somebody responsible for getting bin Laden. In short, he is very unhappy with the reckless and indifferent policies and actions of the Bush years.

Here is a bit where he points out that the execution of policy has been indifferent and anemic under Bush (and the "pretend" tough guys Rumsfeld and Cheney). This bit is focused on Afghanistan. It is very understated indictment of Bush's ineffective "war" on al Qaeda:

America should also vastly increase its effort to build a larger and stronger Afghan army and air force. In the Korean War, the United States and its UN allies built a South Korean army from almost nothing to a force of 700,000 men in less than three years. By the end of the war, the Koreans were manning much of the front line. It has done far less in Afghanistan, partly because its ambitions have been low and partly because it has not put the resources into the job. Recruiting and training more soldiers should become a major priority, along with supplying them with state-of-the-art equipment and building an airlift capability to get them where they need to be. To this end, and to provide firepower for its army, Afghanistan needs help in constructing an air force. The Soviet invaders built an Afghan communist air force consisting of more than 400 fixed-wing aircraft and 100 helicopters; in six years the United States has built virtually no air capability there. Overall, today in Afghanistan NATO has fewer troops on the ground to stabilize the country than the Soviet Union deployed there in the 1980s and has created an Afghan army to assist that is also fewer in numbers than the one created by the Soviet client's Marxist regime in the 1980s.

Think about this. It has been 8 years in Afghanistan and 6 years in Iraq and neither country has a truly effective army or national police. If you remember Bush ran for presidency in 2004 by talking about how fast he was building up Iraq's military to "take over" the fighting. There was lots of talk about tens of thousands of troups at various levels of "combat ready" that never emerged in 2005, 2006, 2007, or 2008 to do any "combat". It was a joke. It was a fraud on the US electorate. It was a fraud as grand in scope as Nixon running in 1968 with a "secret peace plan" for Vietnam when in fact he had none.