In an interview on March 18, 2002, CIA Deputy Director of Operations Thomas Twetten said: “…The CIA ignored Afghanistan and its civil war. Twetten felt there was nothing the United States could do to mediate the Afghan conflict or put the country back together again. There were too many other challenges in a world so suddenly and vastly changed by communism’s collapse. The Afghan war threatened to destabilize the new Central Asian countries, but even that danger seemed remote. Afghanistan was ‘just really background’ at the Directorate of Operations only two years after it had been at the center of one of the CIA’s most important and richly funded covert programs.”
– Steve Coll, Ghost Wars, Page 265