Ahmad Shah Massoud

Ahmad Shah Massoud: The Commander Who Never Lost the Valley

Two Tunisians travelling on stolen Belgian passports had waited nearly three weeks in northeastern Afghanistan for an interview. On 8 September 2001 they threatened to leave unless it happened within a day. It was granted on 9 September at Khwaja Bahauddin. The camera contained a bomb. Ahmad Shah Massoud died in a helicopter bound for a field hospital in Tajikistan, aged forty-eight. Forty-eight hours later, aircraft hit the World Trade Center. He had survived twenty-six years of assassination attempts — by the KGB, Afghan communist intelligence, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, the Taliban, al-Qaeda — and died two days before the war he had spent years warning about.

The Colonel's Son

He was born around 1953 in Jangalak, in the Panjshir Valley, into a Tajik Sunni family, and named for Ahmad Shah Durrani, founder of the Durrani Empire. His father Dost Mohammad Khan was a colonel in the Royal Afghan Army; his mother Bibi Khorshid was, by family account, modern-minded, and educated her daughters as she did her sons.

He went to primary school in Herat and then to the Franco-Afghan Lycée Esteqlal in Kabul, where he became fluent in French and which he later called the happiest period of his life. He turned down scholarships to study in France, preferring to stay, and enrolled at the Soviet-founded Kabul Polytechnic to read engineering and architecture — never bothering to learn Russian. His reading, then and later, was the point: Mao on the Long March, Guevara's memoirs, de Gaulle, Võ Nguyên Giáp, Sun Tzu, and an American counterterrorism handbook he called the most instructive of all.

Radicalised by the 1967 war at fourteen, he joined the Muslim Youth under Professor Burhanuddin Rabbani. In July 1975 he led a rising against Daoud Khan in the Panjshir, took the Rokha garrison, and was crushed when promised support from Kabul never came. He was twenty-two. Hekmatyar tried to have him killed that same year.

Nine Offensives

In May 1979 he walked back into the Panjshir with twenty-four companions. By July he had abandoned open insurrection for guerrilla war, on a four-phase plan: build a resistance the civilian population actually supported; conduct an "active defence" of the valley; take the offensive across the north; then generalise it nationally.

Between 1980 and 1985 the Soviets came at the Panjshir roughly twice a year, at one point committing 30,000 combat troops. Massoud's answer was consistent and elegant — withdraw the population and fighters into fortified subsidiary valleys, ambush the armoured columns on the approach, then reoccupy the ground as the Soviets pulled back. They never took it. In 1983 he accepted a temporary truce, using the pause to rebuild rather than to rest, and founded the Shura-e Nazar, a supervisory council uniting 130 commanders across twelve provinces and cutting across the Peshawar party factions that fragmented every other Afghan front.

The force grew from under a thousand ill-equipped guerrillas in 1980 to 13,000 by 1989, organised into three tiers: village militia, semi-mobile shock troops, and thirty-three-man commando groups that struck up to 100 kilometres out. They wore uniforms; their pakul caps became the emblem of the Afghan resistance. Britain's MI6 sent instructors, silenced sniper rifles and — crucially — radios; the CIA, working through Pakistan, largely favoured Hekmatyar instead. Meanwhile Massoud divided the valley into twenty-two administrative bases, each with a military commander, a civilian administrator, a judge, a prosecutor and a public defender, plus committees for economy, health, education and culture. He was running a state.

Kabul, and the Ruin of It

In April 1992 the Najibullah government collapsed and Massoud's coalition took Kabul. The Peshawar Accord made him defence minister of the new Islamic State of Afghanistan; Hekmatyar refused to sign and, backed by Pakistan, bombarded the capital he could not enter. Iran-backed Hazara and Saudi-backed Sunni factions joined in; Dostum switched sides repeatedly. Massoud resigned in March 1993 to buy a peace that lasted weeks.

His record here is genuinely contested. In the February 1993 Afshar operation, his forces and their Ittihad allies attacked a Hazara-held district of Kabul; Human Rights Watch and the Afghanistan Justice Project hold him responsible for failing to prevent atrocities against civilians and for shelling residential areas. He convened a meeting the next day ordering the killing and looting stopped, and failed to stop it. Others dispute the attribution — Roy Gutman argues witnesses implicated Ittihad units not under his command, and the correspondent Edward Girardet, present in Kabul, insists he neither ordered the crimes nor could control every commander in a collapsing city. Both things are probably true, and neither is exculpatory.

The Last Stand

The Taliban took Kandahar in 1994. Massoud beat them at Herat in February 1995 by airlifting 2,000 troops, and broke a year-long siege of Kabul. But when Jalalabad was bought out from under him in September 1996, leaving the capital open from every direction, he ordered a full retreat rather than fight for a city he could not hold and would have destroyed. The Taliban entered Kabul on 27 September.

For five years he held roughly thirty per cent of Afghanistan with the United Islamic Front, becoming after Dostum's 1998 defeat the only front-line leader still fighting; the rest lived in exile. The Taliban repeatedly offered him a share of power. He refused, calling the differences with his pro-democratic position insurmountable, and predicted they would fall the moment Pakistani support ended. In September 2000 he signed the Declaration of Essential Rights of Afghan Women; in his territory the burqa was not compulsory and girls' schools operated through the war. In April 2001, invited to address the European Parliament by its president Nicole Fontaine, who called him "the pole of liberty in Afghanistan," he asked for humanitarian aid and warned that a large-scale terrorist attack on American soil was imminent.

Why Ahmad Is Called a Genius

The claim rests on demonstrable achievement rather than reputation. Sandy Gall's study, titled *Afghan Napoleon*, concludes from Massoud's own diaries that he was "both a brilliant military strategist and an able administrator" — and the conjunction is what is unusual. Repeated Soviet offensives, at one point 30,000 troops, failed against a force that began as under a thousand men; the Taliban never took the Panjshir while he lived. He designed a three-tier force structure, a cross-factional command council spanning twelve provinces, and a civil administration with courts and public defenders, all under bombardment. CIA officers who met him in 2001 found a house holding thousands of books — Persian poetry, war histories in several languages, biographies of guerrilla commanders — and a man who "wove sophisticated, measured references to Afghan history and global politics" into his arguments. He read Mao, Giáp and Sun Tzu, then applied them to his own terrain rather than imitating them.

The counter-case matters. Massoud was a superb commander and a failed politician: the government he served as defence minister was a stillborn state, and the Kabul his forces contested was reduced to rubble. Human Rights Watch holds him personally implicated in the civilian killings at Afshar in 1993, and his own order to stop them went unheeded — a commander who cannot control his troops is being judged by the standard he set himself. He never won a national settlement, and the alliance he assembled in 2001 was untested when he died. His genius was operational and organisational, exercised at the scale of a valley and an army; it did not extend to holding a country together.

Legacy

Hamid Karzai's government named him a national hero of Afghanistan, and 9 September was observed as Martyrs' Day under the republic. He is widely regarded as one of the most influential guerrilla commanders of the twentieth century, with the cult of personality to match — the "Che Guevara figure" the CIA saw. His son Ahmad Massoud now leads the National Resistance Front against a restored Taliban emirate, from the same valley, on much the same logic. The strategy outlived the strategist; whether it works twice is not yet settled.

Achievements

• Educated at Lycée Esteqlal and Kabul University
• Worked as politician and military leader