Ahmad Shah Massoud—‘The Afghan who won the Cold War’ and outsmarted Gen Zia-ul-Haq, CIA


(✍️ by Sandy Gall for The Print)
In 'Afghan Napoleon', Sandy Gall delves deep into the life of Massoud, who proved himself as the 'outstanding Afghan guerrilla leader'.

Twelve years after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and after some of the bloodiest fighting seen in the twentieth century, Ahmad Shah Massoud proved himself the outstanding Afghan guerrilla leader to have emerged from the Soviet–Afghan War when he finally captured Kabul. His victory on Wednesday, 29 April 1992 – ahead of his rivals, leading a column of tanks, armoured personnel carriers, and lorryloads of jubilant troops into the centre of the city – was in many ways the apogee of his career.

He ousted Najibullah, the hulking Pashtun former KHAD chief, nicknamed ‘The Ox’, whom the Russians had left in charge. Despite the machinations of Pakistan’s powerful spy agency, the ISI, to gain control of Kabul for its own favourite, the Pashtun extremist Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, they were outmanoeuvred by Massoud, who demonstrated his considerable political as well as military skills by creating a winning coalition. He had forecast that it would take three years after the Russian withdrawal to retrain the mujahideen to fight a conventional (as opposed to guerrilla) war and take Kabul from the communists – and it did.

As well as Massoud’s own tough-as-nails Panjsheri mujahideen, the coalition included troops commanded by two government generals, both of whom had defected to him: Abdul Rashid Dostum’s fierce Uzbek militia, known as the Kilim Jam, and Abdul Momen’s well-trained and well-armed regulars.1 The citizens of Kabul, who had suffered under the heel of the Soviet occupiers and their Afghan communist minions for many years, gave Massoud a hero’s welcome.

The last few weeks of the Najibullah regime were nail-bitingly tense, with Massoud’s lifelong enemy, Hekmatyar, desperately trying to win the prize of Kabul for himself. Fierce fighting – pitting Massoud’s mujahideen and Dostum’s Kilim Jam against Hekmatyar’s Hisb-i-Islami fighters allied with communist troops – raged for several days but, by the time Massoud arrived in Kabul, the battle was over.

To be continued…