The Commander looked every inch the international statesman that he had grudgingly been forced into becoming. Even dressed in well-worn battle fatigues and standing in a mud hut in the middle of a small village in the inhospitable mountainous North of Afghanistan, he exuded the unmistakeable aura of a born leader. Massoud Ahmad Shah was the charismatic chief of the Northern Alliance, likened by many in the West to a latter-day Che Guevara. His presence and stature alone demanded respect. By any standards he was a good-looking man, with sharp features, and he spoke eloquently. His face, both resolute and yet somehow dreamy at the same time, represented the dichotomy that had begun to epitomise Massoud. Journalists who interviewed him found it impossible not to be captivated by the ‘Massoud charm’ when he spoke, even though they did not understand a word of what he said.

The story of how the son of a Police Commander from Jangalak in the Panjsher Valley had forged an almost unbeatable army from a small band of fugitives living on wild mulberries was already the stuff of legends. The heavy losses that his crudely equipped troops, armed with just ten Kalashnikov AK47 machine guns and two rocket launchers, had inflicted on the invincible Red Army had earned him a standing as one of the greatest guerrilla commanders ever.

But now, after two decades of almost continuous conflict, the Commander was showing signs of fatigue. He was feeling less the sly, belligerent predator and more and more the cornered prey. His once sharp brown eyes looked weary, and strands of grey now speckled his thick black hair. This man who went to college to become an architect and create beautiful buildings had inadvertently ended up as his country’s last hope of salvation, and the heavy burden was now starting to show.

Standing at the window crudely hewn in the mud brick wall, Massoud looked out at the nomadic village that stretched down into the rocky gorge below his hut. The heavy hemp cloth hastily pressed into service as a curtain flapped in the light breeze. The village, Khawaja Bahauddin, looked like the rest of Afghanistan: downtrodden and soiled, beaten by almost two decades of successive conflicts into submissive oblivion. The dilapidated buildings resembled rotting teeth in the receding gums of streets littered with war debris. Each wall left standing in the village was blemished with pockmarks representing virtually every calibre of ammunition known to man. Windows barely hanging from frames clattered in the wind. Ceilings were propped up on floors and pools of undeterminable slime covered the ground. The roads were strewn with the paraphernalia of war; rotting Russian tanks sat outside the perimeter of the village, soldiers patrolled the streets in a concoction of cannibalised vehicles with an equally cannibalised arsenal of weapons, Kalashnikovs and RPGs cradled in their arms, young faces smiling nervously. Hastily-constructed gun ramparts housing field artillery and anti-aircraft munitions haphazardly dotted the village. And everything was coated in a thin layer of brown dirt.

Down by the riverbank several young fighters sat cleaning their rifles, while others nearby were loading up an abandoned Soviet truck with crates of ammunition. All were wearing snow parkas with blankets thrown over their shoulders, some had old Soviet army pants, and several were without shoes. Above them vapour trails of Taliban MiG jets criss-crossed the clear blue skies. In the distance, the dull thuds of artillery exchanges provided a stark reminder that Afghanistan’s problems were far from over, for fighting had once again enveloped Afghanistan and with it had come all the ingredients of Afghan warfare: brutality, greed, starvation, and poverty. To Afghans, this was nothing new; the cycle of invasion, war, bribery, liberation and subjugation had been a part of Afghan history for centuries – only the cast of players kept changing. The Greeks, the Romans, Alexander the Great, Genghis Khan, the Moguls – all at one time or another had laid waste vast areas of Afghanistan, killing countless people in the process.

Khawaja Bahauddin was a strange place, by any stretch of the imagination. For almost a year now it had been the unlikely capital of Afghanistan. As they had settled in for the long haul, Massoud’s Mujahideen had begun to commandeer the ramshackle huts in the village and to rename them – Ministry of the Interior, Ministry of Education, Ministry of Foreign affairs, each with its own Minister, accompanying bureaucracy and assorted hangers-on. Villagers who had been simple farmers until a year ago had now become ‘government officials’, full of self-importance and an assumed air of arrogance that they felt a necessary prerequisite for the positions they now held.

Some of the buildings supported satellite dishes pointing up somewhat expectantly at the western skies hoping perhaps to catch some good news. There wasn’t any, and more often than not neither was there any electricity.

With the Taliban regime in Kabul not officially recognised by the rest of the world, Massoud and his rag-tag entourage had become, in the eyes of the West, the legitimate government of Afghanistan. Thus the village attracted various foreign diplomats and dignitaries intent on meeting with the ‘Afghan Government’.

Massoud closed his eyes and began to drink in the hot wind. ‘The Shamal, Khalili. The winds of freedom begin to blow. I wonder, will they bring peace to our land this year?’

‘If Allah wills it then it will be so, Commander.’

Massoud Khalili was the Commander’s most trusted and loyal friend. Having known each other from childhood, they had fought side by side and thus had that rare bond that could only have been forged on the battlefield. Like Massoud, Khalili was in his forties, smart, cheerful, and ready-witted. Both sported beards, not unruly like the Taliban dictated, but stylishly trimmed. Khalili sat on the gaily-coloured sofa, his green and brown fatigues clashing with the multicoloured soft furnishings.

Both had arrived back in Khawaja Bahauddin by helicopter the previous evening. Massoud had uncharacteristically summoned Khalili, the Northern Alliance’s Ambassador to India, back to Afghanistan and had flown across the border into friendly Tajikistan to receive his old comrade.

‘Just listen to the wind, Khalili. Trust me, God has sent the Shamal early this year to sweep our land clean...’

Khalili nodded pensively. Of the two he was the pragmatist, and this, when combined with Massoud’s philosophical outlook and growing political savoir-faire, made them a formidable team.

‘This is a sign, my friend. I see a new dawn for our country. No more divisions.’ Massoud continued looking out over the valley, surveying the frantic military activity taking place outside. ‘I see a future where we will all be Afghans first – not Tajiks, Pashtoons, Sunnis, Shias,.’ He turned to face Khalili. ‘What we have started will end only in one way – the destruction of the Taliban – and we will do that with or without the West. It may take us a month or it may take a year, even longer. But ultimately, mark my words, we shall prevail.’

What had set Massoud apart from the other Mujahideen leaders and proved much more deadly than the limited archaic firepower available to him was his use of revolutionary tactics which he unashamedly borrowed from successful twentieth-century people’s uprisings: the ideas of Mao, Tito, Lenin, Castro and Ho Chi Minh formed the cornerstone of his strategy. And the intellectual

arsenal had proved to be deadly. Massoud had carefully adapted predominately Communist tactics and ideas that would appeal to the rigid Islamic-based Afghan mindset to rally the rural peasants to revolt. So successful was he, that in less than two decades he had played a major role in the ousting of both the Afghan dictator, Muhammad Daoud, as well as the powerful Red Army of the Soviet Union. And now he had set his sights set on ridding his country of the biggest scourge of all, the Taliban.

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