A new book on the CIA's role in Afghanistan and Pakistan -- This Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan and bin Laden -- reveals how security needs often forced the U.S. administration to bend its professed foreign policy goals such as non-proliferation.

The softening of the U.S. policy towards Pakistan's nuclear program followed the Soviet invasion and occupation of Afghanistan in 1979, the book says. Soon after the invasion, Brzezinski wrote to Carter, This will require a review of our policy toward Pakistan, more guarantees to it, more arms aid, and, alas, a decision that our security policy toward Pakistan cannot be dictated by our non-proliferation policy.

Pakistan, now a key U.S. ally in the war against terror, also played a pivotal role in defeating the Soviet occupation forces in Afghanistan. Throughout the Soviet presence -- 1979 to 1989 -- Pakistan served as a conduit for U.S. weapons for the Afghan resistance. It also allowed Afghan resistance fighters to use its territory for conducting guerrilla raids into Afghanistan, trained thousands of fighters and sheltered more than 3 million Afghan refugees.

Early in the Afghan war, policymakers in Washington realized that they could not defeat the Soviets without Pakistan's help and provided huge financial and military assistance to Pakistan in return.

But it was also during this period that Pakistan secretly worked on a nuclear weapons program. Pakistan launched its nuclear program in 1974, soon after rival India conducted its first test. Although Pakistan tested its devices in May 1998, in response to similar tests by India, international nuclear experts believe that Islamabad had acquired nuclear capability by 1988, a year before the Russians withdrew from Kabul.

Less than a year after the Russians left Kabul in 1989, President George H.W. Bush imposed sweeping sanctions on Pakistan but it was already too late to undo the country's nuclear program.

The book also shows how the Clinton and Bush administrations missed several chances to target al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden.

During the winter of 1998-1999, the CIA learned that a large party of Persian Gulf dignitaries had flown into the Afghan desert for a falcon-hunting party. The report from CIA field agents said that bin Laden had also joined the party.

The agency called for an attack on their encampment until Richard Clarke, President Clinton's counter-terrorism aide, discovered that among the hosts of the gathering was royalty from the United Arab Emirates.

Clarke had been instrumental in a 1998 deal to sell 80 F-16 military jets to the UAE, which was also a crucial supplier of oil and gas to America and its allies. The strike was called off.

The author of the book, Steve Coll was the Washington Post's South Asia bureau chief from 1989 to 1992 and was based in New Delhi. Among the notable figures he interviewed for the book is former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, who acknowledges that she knew Pakistan was helping the Taliban but did not share this information with the U.S. administration while in power.

Besides three former CIA directors, Coll also interviewed several senior CIA officials who had headed the agency's Islamabad station during the Afghan war: Howard Hart, station chief in 1981, William Piekney, 1984-1986, and Milton Bearden, 1986 -1989.

The book claims that Pakistan's main religious party, the Jamaat-e-Islami, has strong links to the Muslim Brotherhood, which later produced senior al-Qaida leaders like bin Laden and his deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri. The Jamaat, says the author, was strongly backed by the Pakistan Army.

Coll writes that William Casey, the CIA's director from January 1981 to January 1987 -- more than any other American -- was responsible for welding the alliance of the CIA, Saudi intelligence, and the Pakistan Army during the Afghan war.

On the suggestion of Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence spy agency, Casey printed thousands of copies of the Koran and got them distributed in Afghanistan and Soviet Uzbekistan. He also encouraged, without presidential authority, Muslim attacks inside the U.S.S.R.

In the post-Casey era, some U.S. scholars, journalists, and members of Congress questioned the CIA's support to the Pakistan-backed Islamist Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, especially after he refused to shake hands with President Ronald Reagan because he was an infidel. But Milton Bearden, CIA's Islamabad station chief from 1986 to 1989, and Frank Anderson, chief of the Afghan task force at the CIA headquarters, continued to defend Hekmatyar on the grounds that he fielded the most effective anti-Soviet fighters, says the book.

Even after the Soviet Union withdrew from Afghanistan in 1989, the CIA continued to follow Pakistani initiatives, such as aiding Hekmatyar's successor, Mullah Omar, leader of the Taliban, the book says.

According to the book, Edmund McWilliams, the State Department's special envoy to the Afghan resistance in 1988-1989, wrote, American authority and billions of dollars in taxpayer funding had been hijacked at the war's end by a ruthless anti-American cabal of Islamists and Pakistani intelligence officers determined to impose their will on Afghanistan. CIA officials, however, denounced him and planted stories in the U.S. Embassy in Islamabad that he might be homosexual or an alcoholic.

The book portrays Gen. Zia-ul-Huq, who led Pakistan during the Afghan war, as a devout Muslim and who assisted Islamist groups in his own country, in Afghanistan, and throughout the world. But he was not a fanatic and would not have been included in the U.S. Embassy's annual beard census, which maintained a record of Pakistani military officers who kept their beards for religious reasons, the book says.

With the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the United States lost interest in Afghanistan. This allowed Saudi and Pakistani intelligence agencies to create a new group of jihadis, the Taliban. The new group proved to be the most militarily effective of the Afghan warring factions.

Pakistani rulers, from Zia to Gen. Pervez Musharraf and the two civilians who ruled the country in the interim period, all supported the Taliban in pursuit of Zia's dream -- a loyal, Pashtun-led Islamist government in Kabul, says Coll.

Every Pakistani general, liberal or religious, Coll says, "believed in the jihadists by 1999, not from personal Islamic conviction, in most cases, but because the jihadists had proved themselves over many years as the one force able to frighten, flummox and bog down the Hindu-dominated Indian army.

To the west, in Afghanistan, the Taliban provided geopolitical 'strategic depth' against India and protection from rebellion by Pakistan's own restive Pashtun population.

Bearden, the former CIA station chief in Islamabad, told Coll that the Saudi General Intelligence Department, or Istakhbarat, and private Arab donors were sending up to $25 million a month to Afghan Islamist armies.

Pakistan trained between 16,000 and 18,000 fresh Muslim recruits on the Afghan frontier every year, and another 6,500 were instructed by Afghans inside the country beyond ISI control. Most of these eventually joined Osama bin Laden's private army of 35,000 Arab Afghans.

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