By
Nona Polichick
Dead Rebel Of The Week
~ Ahmed Shah Massoud ~
Okay, so we all know what happened on September 11, 2001. What a lot of us have less of a grasp on is the political wrangling that incubated that particular terrorist denouement. We’ve been given the government-approved Cliff Notes version, which is easily summed up and digested by people with a short attention span and a collective addiction to various electronic boxes. Unfortunately this is only one small corner of the story fed to us from a very narrow point of view. In truth the 9/11 attacks were born of a more complex scheme of events and motivations, and the people responsible have many more axes to grind than just with us. One of those “other axes” got buried in the forehead of one of Al Qaeda’s most wily and durable opponents on September 9, 2001. The name Ahmed Shah Massoud doesn’t mean much to most Americans, but it should. His assassination was intrinsically linked to September 11. He fought the same enemies we’ve spent the past fifty years fighting, starting with the Soviet Union and later moving on to Al Qaeda, defeating one and holding off the other with few men and fewer resources, for the better part of his short lifetime.
They called him “the Lion of Panjshir”. He was born into an aristocratic Afghan family and was a gifted architect in the once-upon-a-time artisan culture of Afghanistan. If he’d been an American, he probably could have spent his life being celebrated as an artist and visionary in the model of a Frank Lloyd Wright, or as an ivory-tower intellectual. But he was a native Afghani, and life made other plans for him. In engineering school he embarked on a sociopolitical journey, aligning himself with an Islamic nationalist political movement that was gaining momentum in response to Communist-sympathetic political leaders who were gaining a toehold in the Afghan government.
In 1973 Massoud was involved in his first coup attempt, which failed to make it beyond the planning stages and which resulted in his flight from University in Kabul. With the moderate Islamic movement’s leader, Habib Rahman, in jail, leadership of the movement divided itself between Massoud, its intellectual lieutenant, and a dude called Gullbudin Hekmatyar, its chief military strategist. The two clashed bitterly over the movement’s direction; Hekmatyar felt that terrorist acts were a lynchpin of their strategy to gain power, while Massoud was vehemently opposed to resorting to terrorism. Even at this early stage in his military and political life, Massoud was a rebel among rebels. Not only did he rebel against the secular tyranny of communism, but he was the only modern Islamic leader who refused to abide by the coda of extremism and terrorism. The position he put himself in even this early in the game was already planting the seeds of his later undoing, but he didn’t appear to give a shit; he never compromised his own principles or surrendered his beliefs to either side.
Nevertheless, he returned to school in Kabul and eventually agreed to work with Hekmatyar on another coup attempt. Once again spies within the movement revealed the plans to the government and Massoud was forced to flee to Pakistan. After a regrouping period, during which Hekmatyar gained control of the movement with Rahman’s blessing from jail, Massoud was ordered to lead a coup d’etat that collapsed when it became clear that Hekmatyar had given bogus information to the insurgents about the size and force of their opposition. Massoud escaped once again to Pakistan but eventually returned to Kabul. The Islamic insurgents split into two groups and Hekmatyar became the first in a long line of homicidal enemies whom Massoud would manage to elude time and again throughout his life.
His second sworn enemy would prove a little more difficult – it would be the entire Red army. When the Soviets, for whom Afghanistan had already been “softened up” by a leftist-friendly government, officially invaded Afghanistan in 1979, the Islamic insurgent groups – by this time there were many, most of them extremist terrorists – formed a loose, uneasy alliance. Massoud now had to assume the dual role of chief military strategist and de facto prime minister of the Muhjadin rebels of northern Afghanistan. It was a role at which he proved extremely adept, and he nickel-and-dimed the Soviets into ultimate defeat after nearly a decade of fighting. He achieved this end not only by guerilla-style military attacks (never resorting to acts of terrorism, which he continued to hold in the highest contempt) but by exercising a tight control, with the full cooperation of local farmers, over the agricultural output of the country’s fertile northern regions. He banned the cultivation, sale and use of nearly all drugs and tobacco products, especially cigarettes, which he knew Soviet soldiers consumed at a furious rate. With the northern farmers cooperating in the ban, most cigarette manufacture in Afghanistan was wiped out and butts became scarce. This vexed Soviet occupiers and put them at a further disadvantage in fighting in the mountainous, demanding terrain of the north. Conversely – some might actually term it perversely – Massoud was okay with opium cultivation for personal use.
When the Soviets were finally definitively beaten back in 1988, the Muhjadin continued to assail the now crippled communist government and it finally gasped its last in 1992. The four years were tense. Massoud and Hekmatyar were still locked in their longstanding feud over the direction of the group. Massoud was elected president of the assembly and secretary of defense for the new government, but the Muhjadin regime was short-lived; with the receding of the Communist threat Islamic fundamentalists, aided by Pakistan’s Secret Service the ISI, moved into Afghanistan like a fog.
The fractures within the Muhjadin weakened them sufficiently to allow the Taliban, backed by the Pakistani army, to mount a coup. Hekmatyar, who found the fundamentalist whackjobs to be on the same page with him religiously, publicly made nice with Pakistan.
Massoud was ousted and driven north, where he immediately began regrouping his guerilla forces to retake Kabul. But as the nineties wore on and the Taliban gained strength, the number of people out to kill Massoud for various reasons had grown to such a degree that he could rarely go out in public anymore. The Taliban wanted to try him for educational and artistic foundations he had established during the Muhjadins’ brief reign, because these foundations were against Taliban law. Hekmatyar of course wanted him out of the way, as did the ISI and Al Qaeda. Fundamentalists had overtaken moderate Muslim leaders like Massoud in regional influence, and Al Qaeda wanted to eliminate moderates.
On September 9, 2001, an Al Qaeda suicide bomber posing as a photographer was granted an interview with Massoud in his hiding place. A few minutes after the Al Qaeda operative entered, Afghanistan lost its last true democratically elected leader and the most important voice in the moderate Muslim movement had been silenced.
Ahmed Shah Massoud bore the tag of “rebel” all his life and embraced this fate wholeheartedly. He never compromised his beliefs and did everything his way. He inspired his countrymen and kept pushing, right until the end.
