In General: Ahmad Shah Massoud

Name:

Ahmad Shah Massoud

Nickname:

Shir-e-Panjshir (“The Lion of Panjshir” or “The Lion of Five Lions”)

Affiliation:

Afghan Mujaheddin
United Islamic Front for the Salvation of Afghanistan (Northern Alliance)

Conflict:

Afghan-Soviet War
Afghan Civil War

Nemesis:

Osama Bin Laden
Mullah Omar
Ayman al-Zawahiri
Mikhail Gorbachev

Notable Victories:

Battle of Panjshir (9 separate attempts to defeat Massoud between 1980 and 1985)

Notable Defeats:

Battle of Kabul (1996)
Assassinated September 9, 2001

Famous Quote:

“If President Bush doesn’t help us, these terrorists will damage the US and Europe very soon.”  ~Massoud to European Parliament on April 7, 2001. In a request for aid in fighting the Taliban, Massoud tried to warn the west that 9/11 was about to happen.

Famous tactics:

Massoud broke up his men into smaller combat units with specific roles. The unskilled militia, called mahali, were used for defense of villages and fortified positions. The mahali were reinforced by elite shock troops called grup-i zarbati. These men were used as mobile reserves in response to a Russian attack.

However, Massoud’s weapon of choice were the grup-i-mutaharek. These were fast moving, hard hitting units of 33 men each. They would carry out hit and run attacks again Soviet columns and supply routes. During the defense of The Panjshir Valley, the grup-i-mutaharek were successful in wearing down the attacking Red Army units to the point that they were badly damaged before ever reaching their objective. At that point, they were easy prey for the mahali defenders.

Osama Bin Laden has hoped to emulate Massoud’s tactics against the Americans after 9/11. However, rather than commit large ground units to the war, the Americans instead relied on special operations teams mixed with Massoud’s former army, The Northern Alliance. The special forces would mark targets, and relay information to aircraft using laser and GPS guided bombs. In this way, the US denied Bin Laden the war he wanted. Bin Laden thought he could use Afghanistan to bring down the United States the same way that Massoud brought down the USSR. Luckily, Bin Laden proved that he was nowhere near the military commander that Ahmad Shah Massoud was.

Massoud demonstrated his military prowess most notably throughout his defense of the Panjshir. There he resisted multiple attempts by Russian forces that were superior in numbers, armor, and air superiority. He used Guerrilla tactics to harass Russian supply lines to the point that medals were awarded to the truck drivers that managed to traverse the areas Massoud’s men were known to patrol. When the Russians tried to meet the threat with overwhelming force, Massoud used a system of entrenched positions manned by light infantry to repel tanks and withstand bombardment by artillery and the Soviet Air Force. In one case, the Mujaheddin with a force of approximately 1,000 light infantry defeated a Red Army force of 12,000 infantry, 104 helicopters, and 26 airplanes.

Synopsis:

Ahmad Shah Massoud was an Engineering student at Kabul University when the Soviet Union Invaded Afghanistan. The son of a prominent Afghan official, Massoud would quickly rise to a position of authority among the Mujahaddin (Holy Warriors) who resisted the Soviet occupation.

Everytime I think of Ahmad Shah Massoud, I feel a profound sense of “what if.” To me, Massoud represents everything good that never was between American and Muslim society. He wanted to build, not destroy. But he was forced into conflict to defend his home. I cannot help but wonder if I would have had the same strength of character if I were raised in his part of the world instead of the sheltered life I have enjoyed in the US.

After the war, Massoud wanted nothing more than to rebuild his country and carry on with his life. However, the radicals among his former allies had different ideas. They wanted to use Osama Bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri’s Al Qaeda propaganda machine developed during the war as a means of shaping Afghanistan into a beacon of Radical Islam that would draw volunteers from all over the world to be trained and indoctrinated in the ways of the Taliban. Massoud resisted and they killed him for it.

Massoud tried to warn the west that something big was coming from Al Qaeda and the Taliban. Unfortunately, he was assassinated by Al Queada just two days before 9/11. Following the assassination, the international intelligence community was on high alert knowing that this was only the beginning of something much larger. This is the reason why many say the US knew that 9/11 was about to happen. In reality, the intelligence community knew something was coming, but completely underestimated what Bin Laden was capable of.

It would turn out that Massoud’s assassination was a gift from Osama Bin Laden to his Taliban ally, Mullah Omar. Massoud was the only thorn in the side of the Taliban at that point. He and his Northern Alliance army had resisted the fanatical regime for years following the Soviet withdrawal. Bin Laden knew that 9/11 would bring the wrath of the US military down on the Taliban and the assassination was meant to ferment the Alliance between the two fanatics.

Following the overthrow of the Taliban, Afghan President Hamid Karzai named Massoud a national hero and a monument is under construction that will become the final resting place of the man who held the line against the Taliban for years while the rest of the world ignored what was happening in Afghanistan.

But what if Massoud had been successful? What if Bin Laden and Mullah Omar were not able to build their fundamentalist regime? Would 911, 311, Gulf War II, The Mumbai attack, The USS Cole Bombing, or The Embassy Bombings still have happened? Would Western Pakistan and Afghanistan be peaceful places now? Would Radical Islam still be little more than the nuisance the United States considered it to be in the 80’s and early 90’s?

No one can say. But to me Ahmad Shah Massoud represents hope that my kids won’t grow up in a world dominated by Radical Islam. Of course, he was no saint. He allied himself with radicals, drug lords, and warlords alike. But if men like Massoud were to drive out the fanatics and assume leadership roles in the Middle East and parts of Africa and Asia, then maybe there is a chance that human civilization will survive the next century.

~Man Overboard

Image used in this Post

Ahmad Shah Massoud image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons published under the CC license.