Afghan Napoleon: The Life of Ahmad Shah Massoud

By Sandy Gall and Rory Stewart

The first biography in a decade of Afghan resistance leader Ahmad Shah Massoud.

When the Soviets invaded Afghanistan in 1979, the forces of resistance were disparate. Many groups were caught up in fighting each other and competing for Western arms. The exception were those commanded by Ahmad Shah Massoud, the military strategist and political operator who solidified the resistance and undermined the Russian occupation, leading resistance members to a series of defensive victories.
 
Sandy Gall followed Massoud during Soviet incursions and reported on the war in Afghanistan, and he draws on this first-hand experience in his biography of this charismatic guerrilla commander. Afghan Napoleon includes excerpts from the surviving volumes of Massoud’s prolific diaries—many translated into English for the first time—which detail crucial moments in his personal life and during his time in the resistance. Born into a liberalizing Afghanistan in the 1960s, Massoud ardently opposed communism, and he rose to prominence by coordinating the defense of the Panjsher Valley against Soviet offensives. Despite being under-equipped and outnumbered, he orchestrated a series of victories over the Russians. Massoud’s assassination in 2001, just two days before the attack on the Twin Towers, is believed to have been ordered by Osama bin Laden. Despite the ultimate frustration of Massoud’s attempts to build political consensus, he is recognized today as a national hero.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Haus Publishing
• Release date: Sep 7, 2021
• ISBN: 9781913368234

Sandy Gall

Sandy Gall CBE, is a British journalist, author, and former ITN news presenter. His career as a journalist spans over fifty years. Sandy Gall has written several books about Afghanistan and made three documentaries about the country during the Soviet War (two of which were nominated for BAFTA awards).

Book preview

Prologue

The two friends slipped easily into a familiar routine. Ahmad Shah Massoud, the legendary Afghan guerrilla commander, was sitting down for an interview with two Arab ‘journalists’, and his best friend and frequent interpreter, Masood Khalili, leaned in towards him to translate his answers. They were so close that their shoulders were touching.

It was mid-morning on Sunday, 9 September 2001 in Khoja Bahauddin, Massoud’s northern base on the bank of the Amu Darya, the classical Oxus River, which marks the northern boundary of Afghanistan: a fitting place for martyrdom.

Several people were in the room. Asim Suhail, Massoud’s press secretary, was present, and Fahim Dashty, an Afghan reporter, appeared at the back with a small camera. Massoud asked his intelligence chief, Engineer Aref,¹ to go down to the ground floor to monitor the satellite telephone. Aref left the room, followed by Jamshid, Massoud’s cousin and close aide.

The ‘reporter’ read out his questions; the ‘cameraman’, having placed the camera very close to Massoud, had moved some distance away.

The questions were odd and the camera too close, but Massoud said, ‘Let’s begin.’ As Khalili turned to translate the first question, he saw a blue flash streaking towards them.

A powerful blast shattered the morning, engulfing the room in fire, changing the history of Afghanistan and the world.

Guards rushed to the room. They found Massoud barely alive. He urged them to look first to Khalili. Suhail was dead; Dashty was badly burned. The ‘interviewer’ was torn apart by explosives that had been strapped round his waist.

The ‘cameraman’ leaped out of the window and tried to escape. The guards chased him to the river and shot him as he waded up to his waist in the water.

1

The British ‘Find’ Massoud

Christmas 1979 was memorable for all the wrong sorts of reasons, at least for the leaders of the United States and Great Britain in particular. While Margaret Thatcher, the British prime minister, her United States counterpart, President Jimmy Carter, and their respective families were preparing to celebrate a convivial Christmas – one at Chequers, near London, and the other at Camp David in the Appalachian Mountains near Washington – the Politburo in Moscow was putting the finishing touches to its top-secret plans to invade Afghanistan and remove from power the brutal and erratic communist prime minister, Hafizullah Amin. Moscow had been debating whether and how to get rid of the increasingly unpopular Amin for several weeks, and any doubts it may have had were dispelled by news from Kabul that he had just had the president, Nur Mohammad Taraki, murdered – suffocated by his own guards.¹

The Soviet president, Leonid Brezhnev, was especially angry, having promised to protect Taraki. ‘What a bastard, that Amin, to murder the man with whom he made the revolution,’ he told his colleagues in the Kremlin.² KGB head Yuri Andropov, ‘mortified’ by his department’s failure to keep control of events, was equally determined to get rid of Amin and install a more manageable leader. With its influence in Kabul now almost zero, and popular unrest in Afghanistan growing, the Soviet leadership turned increasingly to the idea of using force. In fact, Amin had appealed repeatedly to the Kremlin to send troops to Afghanistan to help him keep control of the country. Brezhnev had always refused. Now he saw the request as a perfect opportunity.

The crucial meeting of the Politburo took place on 12 December. Andropov claimed that Amin was increasingly in contact with the CIA – he had studied in America – and warned that if he were to shift his foreign policy towards the West, it could have serious implications for the Soviet Union. Finally, the meeting decided unanimously to send in the troops.³ Amin seemed to be oblivious to what was coming.

The Russians invaded on 25 December, Christmas Day, stormed Amin’s palace, and killed him. The invasion came as a shock to the leaders of the West, particularly to President Carter, who, despite having seen satellite images of the Soviet military build-up, which the CIA provided in abundance, apparently did not believe the Russians would actually take the plunge. On 28 December, he rang Thatcher. ‘We discussed at length what the Soviets were doing in Afghanistan,’ she wrote in her memoirs, ‘and what our reaction should be. What had happened was a bitter blow to him.’⁴ She was less surprised than Carter, being more sceptical of Russian intentions. ‘From now on,’ she added, ‘the whole tone of international affairs began to change, and for the better. Hard-headed realism and strong defence became the order of the day. The Soviets had made a fatal miscalculation: they had prepared the way for the renaissance of America under Ronald Reagan.’

Soon after the invasion, Gerry Warner,⁵ the newly appointed Far East controller of Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service (SIS, better known as MI6), was briefing one of his brightest young officers about a mission which was a direct result of the Soviet invasion, and about the long conversation between Thatcher and Carter. During that conversation, they had jointly agreed they would give the Afghans all the help they could against the Russians – short of going to war. Warner’s briefing concluded with what has become a famously worded assignment: ‘I want you to go and find Napoleon when he is still an artillery officer.’⁶

‘Why Napoleon?’ I asked Warner later.

‘Because he was a colonel of artillery who became Emperor of France,’ he replied. ‘That was the sort of person we were looking for.’⁷

And they found him, as we shall see.

So, the ‘very, very able and intelligent chap’, as Warner described his emissary, an ex-soldier in receipt of what might have been considered a very tall order, packed his bags and set out soon afterwards for Islamabad, the garden-city capital of Pakistan, designed by Greek architects, where MI6 had an office in the British High Commission (as the embassy is known, since Pakistan is part of the British Commonwealth). After listening to the advice of his colleagues there, he drove up the Grand Trunk Road – a relic of the days of the Raj – to Peshawar, the capital of what was still known as the North-West Frontier Province (and is now Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province), the stepping stone to the Khyber Pass and Afghanistan.

Peshawar was the sort of place where, not very far from the old- fashioned, down-at-heel, very British Dean’s Hotel, he might have seen – as I did one day – Afghan horsemen in turbans trotting across a bridge into the main bazaar. They made me think of Kipling, his love affair with the tribal culture of the frontier, and that great epic poem, ‘The Ballad of East and West’.

Peshawar was also the centre of the fledgling Afghan resistance movement. This was the place to put your ear to the ground. This ‘our chap’ did, ending up with a name which would become world famous: Ahmad Shah Massoud, a dynamic young Afghan mujahideen⁸ commander who was already making a name for himself fighting the Russians. The word ‘massoud’ – also spelled ‘masood’ or ‘masud’ – means ‘lucky’ in Persian; Commander Massoud, as he became, was to be almost unbelievably lucky until one day, in September 2001, his luck ran out. But that was still a long way away in the future.

The MI6 officer from London returned in due course and reported back to his superiors. ‘We realised three things,’ Warner said. ‘First of all, the Americans and the Pakistanis were in complete control of all the people in the south of Afghanistan, who on the whole were more extreme Muslims – Islamists.’⁹ He was referring to the warlike Pashtun clans, such as the Haqqanis, who lived mainly in the south of Afghanistan, made up about 40 per cent of the population, and were also a substantial minority in Pakistan. There are about five million Pashtuns in Afghanistan and ten million in Pakistan, a consequence of the redrawing in 1893 of the Afghan–Indian (now Afghan–Pakistani) border, known as the Durand Line, by the British civil servant Henry Durand and the Afghan ruler Amir Abdur Rahman.

The second thing, Warner said, was that ‘the CIA were very sensibly banned from going into Afghanistan themselves, because any direct conflict between the superpowers, in the shape of the CIA and the KGB, might well have had serious repercussions. The third thing and the most important, really, was that we had heard of this chap up in the Panjsher’ – Ahmad Shah Massoud. Unlike the CIA, MI6 did not have a blanket ban on entering Afghanistan but, ‘as with all our operations, we sought political clearance on each individual operation. The CIA could not get to Massoud in the Panjsher. We could, and by so doing could make an important and distinctive contribution to the overall support of the mujahideen.’¹⁰

But first, the MI6 officer sent to Pakistan to find an ‘Afghan Napoleon’ had to be sure he had the right man. To gauge how the war was going, the British tracked Russian internal communications through their secret listening station, the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), presumably picking up accounts of battles. ‘This man stuck out to me as somebody who was prepared to do things and get on with it and so – I suppose you could say – I selected him,’ the MI6 officer said. The aim was ‘to make things as bloody difficult for the Soviets as we could and support what we thought was the right sort of person to do it.’¹¹ The British noted that Massoud had established territorial control of the Panjsher Valley, pushed government troops out of much of the valley, and occasionally sent units to hit Russian forces beyond. Warner agreed with his emissary: ‘Massoud’s quality impressed the first people who met him straightaway,’ and he noted that Massoud, for his part, was ‘quick to realise that this was an opportunity’ and that ‘the sort of help we were prepared to offer was in fact very worthwhile.’

With what seem higher moral principles than were often displayed in the Cold War, Warner decided to cross the border into Afghanistan to satisfy himself that the Afghans ‘knew what they were getting into’. A small jirga, a tribal assembly, was arranged in a school, presumably in the border area – he could not remember