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Amerine had fresh intelligence that Taliban fighters were preparing to attack from a hideout over the next ridgeline. His air support officer made a careless and catastrophic error when he sent the coordinates to a B-52H Stratofortress bomber ready to attack. He had called in an air strike on his own position.

A two-thousand-pound smart bomb came screaming across the sky and struck Team Echo. "The doors and windows flew out," Karzai recounted six months later to a reporter. "I got injured on my face and my head, and I saw this very good fellow, a very nice man, Greg, jump out of his place and just throw himself on me. It was very remarkable, very remarkable. And the tribal chiefs followed; they all covered me from all around." Dirt and rocks and flesh and bones rained down. Explosions shook the earth, and the stunned and shellshocked Afghans thought that the town was under attack by bin Laden's Arab fighters. But it wasn't al Qaeda; it was Team Echo's arsenal of rocket-propelled grenades cooking off. Dazed and bleeding, Karzai saw scores of dead and wounded outside the compound. He slowly realized that "it was not a rocket attack on our room or an RPG attack on our room. It was something else." It was the worst friendly-fire attack by American forces in the decade since the 1991 Gulf War against Iraq. Three American special-forces officers were killed and twenty soldiers and spies were wounded. At least fifty Afghans died.

— The Mission by Tim Weiner

The CIA had been at the heart of almost every American attempt to overthrow foreign governments for more than fifty years, supporting uprisings, subverting rulers, stealing elections. But rarely had its officers conducted covert operations that catapulted the leader of a nation to power. In the cold war, the station chief in the Congo had installed the tyrant Gen. Joseph Mobutu, a coup in Iran had put the imperious Shah on the Peacock Throne, counterinsurgency in the Philippines kept the kleptocrat Ferdinand Marcos secure. These three had reigned for decades, backed by American intelligence, diplomacy, and weapons. The United States supported their brutal and corrupt regimes as bulwarks of anticommunism and American power in Africa and the Middle East and Asia. They brought stability, until they fell.

— The Mission by Tim Weiner