PERSPECTIVE: The resistanceAhmad Massoud: ‘Peace Does Not Mean to Surrender’

Published 31 August 2021

The Taliban is moving to consolidate its control over Afghanistan, but it has run into a problem: As happened before, the Panjshir Valley, northeast of Kabul, remains the only region of the country not under the Islamists’ control. In the valley, Ahmad Massoud has stepped into his famous father’s shoes by establishing himself as the leader of an emerging resistance movement against the Taliban.

The Taliban is moving to consolidate its control over Afghanistan, but it has run into a problem: As happened before, the Panjshir Valley, northeast of Kabul, remains the only region of the country not under the Islamists’ control.

In the valley, Ahmad Massoud has stepped into his famous father’s shoes by establishing himself as the leader of an emerging resistance movement against the Taliban. His father, Ahmad Shah Massoud, who was assassinated by al Qaeda two days before the 9/11 attacks, was one of the leaders of the Northern Alliance, which protected the Panjshir Valley from the Taliban when the Islamist group ruled Afghanistan from 1996 to 2001.

Lynne O’Donnell writes in Foreign Policy that Massoud has declared the valley a safe haven for Afghanis who do not want to live under the Taliban. He notes that his followers, the fiercely independent Tajiks, have kept the valley effectively closed to most outsiders since the Trump’s administration negotiated a deal with the Taliban in 2020.

Massoud told O’Donnell his National Resistance Front has several thousand fighters, and that they have been able to accumulate military hardware has well.

O’Donnell interviewed Massoud by email. Here are two hos his answers to her questions:

O’Donnell: Now that the Taliban have taken control of Kabul and most of Afghanistan, and declared the country an Islamic emirate, what are your plans?
Ahmad Massoud
: My plan is to first pursue peace and to find a way to avoid war and conflict. Our struggle throughout the past 50 years has been for peace, and war has always been imposed upon us. However, peace does not mean to surrender and to allow injustice and inequality to continue in Afghanistan.

If the Taliban are willing to reach a power-sharing deal where power is equally distributed and is decentralized, then we can move toward a settlement that is acceptable to everyone. Anything less than this will be unacceptable to us, and we will continue our struggle and resistance until we achieve justice, equality, and freedom.

….

O’Donnell: Do you think the possibility of plunging Afghanistan into civil war once more is the right thing to do?
Massound
: I do not see this as a civil war. This war has been forced on us by a group that is dependent on many countries and is not an independent national movement. If the Taliban are willing to share power with everyone and are willing to establish justice and to give equal rights and freedom to all of Afghanistan, then I will step down and quit politics.

Also, the conflict in Afghanistan has regional and global dimensions. The countries of the region use Afghanistan for their competitions with each other, and they have been willing to fund proxies to fight against each other in Afghanistan on their behalf.