September 9 2001, Commander Ahmad Sha Massoud, the Lion of Panjshir, the Charismatic leader of the Northern Alliance that was fighting the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, was assassinated by two suicide bombers posing as journalists and commandeered by both the Talibans and Bin Laden. Two days later, the two towers of World Trade Center were collapsing in the streets of New York. Two months later, a US backed Afghan Northern Alliance was routing the Talibans and taking Kabul.
Who was Massoud, why was he killed?
Early on, Massoud, a fundamentalist, fought the Russian forces and its Afghan puppet regime with the Taliban forces. During the civil war that followed the withdrawal of the Russian forces, the Talibans, literally took control of the country and got rid of all the warlords and other opposition forces. According to his close friends, Commander Massoud, who learned to know the Talibans while fighting the Russians, saw a dark side in fundamental Islam and started to drift away from his earlier convictions. With the arrival of Al Qaeda in the wake of the new masters of Kabul, he took refuge to the North and created an Afghan coalition force aimed at getting rid of the Talibans and at restoring peace within a more secular and tolerant Islam. His struggle at the command of the Northern Alliance went mostly unnoticed to the world until the Talibans started to blow up century old statues of Buddha. Public executions, public beating of “un-bearded” men and “disobedient” women, or killing for no reason was kind of acceptable for the self centered and apathetic Western democracies; but how dare the nihilists destroy their cultural heritage and these statues so dear to our intellectuals and historians?
April 4 2001, invited at the European Parliament, he is welcomed like a chief of State despite what the protocol had to say, and tries to warn the world of the dangers brewing in the Taliban ruled Afghanistan, thus signing his death warrant. He pleaded the Afghan cause to the European elected officials, warned the world of the danger represented by inference from Pakistan, the Talibans and foreigners from Al Qaeda. More important was his ignored direct message to America: “If peace is not restored to Afghanistan, if America does not help the Afghan people, it is almost certain that the Afghan problem will spread to America and many more countries”. Sadly, the media did not reverberate his worlds and he even confided to his brother that the Occident”s war on terror was just a bunch of slogans.
He was long convinced that the Talibans were incult mercenaries, a “Pakistanis colonialist tool” used to keep Afghanistan out of the way. Many historians have stated since that Pakistan was afraid of a growing Afghan nationalism and were using the Talibans and their fundamentalism to oppress it in order to make it “unattractive” to the rest of the world and prevent if from becoming a sovereign country. To make things worse, and profiting by the local political chaos, Al Qaeda”s ideologist, the Egyptian Al Zawari and his financer Bin Laden, were also able to install the infrastructure of their “foreign” organization in Afghanistan. Al Qaeda quickly became a state within the state, another entity that Massoud had to fight.
Massoud risked his life to bring his warning message to the occident and eventually paid the ultimate price. Not only was he a political threat to the Talibans and Al Qaeda because of his international iconic status and the message he was pushing, but he was also a military threat because of his charisma that kept the Northern Alliance strongly united in its fight for a free and sovereign Afghanistan.
November 13 2001, a US journalist, Alan Cullison (also a Harvard professor), entered Kabul with the US backed victorious Northern Alliance. The Talibans were defeated and Bin Laden in the run in some remote caves near the border of Pakistan. America”s revenge was consumed and Massoud avenged. In a local market, Alan bought an “Al Quaeda” laptop to replace his, lost in a battle, and found, among tons of incredible data, the original templates of all the accreditations the fake journalists used to get close to Massoud and kill him. As it appeared later, it was critical for the Talibans and Al Qaeda to execute Massoud before September 11 2001 because they knew how America would react to the planned terrorist attacks on New York. The machiavelic plan called for a provoked US military intervention on Muslim Afghanistan to unite the Arab world against America. It also foresaw the possible use of the Northern Alliance by the US as a more discreet american vehicle for retaliation, and dictated the assassination of Commander Massoud to prevent it, as a way to break the cohesion of the Alliance and eventually split it back to irrelevant warring factions.
The plan eventually failed and the Northern Alliance resisted the loss of their adored leader, now resting in peace in a Mausoleum overlooking an almost democratic Afghanistan. The day before his death, Ahmad Shah Massoud, the Lion of Panjshir, shared these verses with a friend: “This wonderful world is nothing else but history, history of deception, dirty tricks and spilled blood. Look up! The night is pregnant, and neither you nor me, know who will be the child of the night. The child of tonight is tomorrow, and nobody can tell what tomorrow will be or how it will be!”.
Amhad Shah Massoud, the Lion of Panjshir! A great man died and America should be aware of his role and remember his name.
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