The ‘Afghan Napoleon’ gave the Soviets hell – until al-Qaeda got him

Shortly after Soviet troops went into Afghanistan in 1979, MI6 dispatched one of their best young agents on a special recruitment mission. With Moscow trying to prop up Kabul’s flagging communist regime, the West saw a chance to make it the Kremlin’s very own Vietnam. The agent’s task was to find Afghanistan’s “Napoleon”: a commander who could unite its tribes in guerrilla warfare, and lead them in government afterwards.

It was a tall order, but from GCHQ’s eavesdroppings on Soviet battle chatter, MI6 had already identified someone who was giving the Russians hell: Ahmad Shah Massoud, the so-called Lion of the Panjshir Valley. He was only 28, but his band of mujahideen fighters were fast turning the Panjshir into a giant graveyard for Soviet troops.

Nor, it seemed, was Massoud just another thuggish warlord. An alumni of Kabul’s Lycée Esteqlal – the Afghan Eton – he spoke fluent French, loved poetry, and wanted Afghanistan to become a moderate, multi-ethnic democracy. As a former MI6 chief tells the veteran ITN correspondent Sandy Gall in his new biography of Massoud, “this chap up in the Panjshir” seemed just the man.

Alas, as so often happens in Afghanistan, a foreign power’s best-laid plans only got so far. Massoud did eventually prevail against the Russians, whose humiliating departure in 1989 spurred the Soviet Union’s ultimate collapse. But after capturing Kabul in 1992, he could not stop Afghanistan lurching into lawlessness, fuelling the rise of the Taliban regime. Two days before 9/11, Massoud was killed by two al-Qaeda agents, who posed as TV journalists and exploded a booby-trapped camera during an interview.

With the West’s own military venture in Afghanistan now unravelling, Gall’s book serves two timely purposes. One is to retell Massoud’s legendary campaign against the Soviets, which saw him dubbed “the Afghan who won the Cold War”. The other, though, is to ask whether more Western support for him in the 1990s could have led to a better Afghanistan.

That, of course, is a hypothetical question – but one that Gall, now 93, is well-qualified to ask. During the Soviet occupation, he reported extensively from Afghanistan, interviewing Massoud on numerous occasions and watching him in battle. This was no small reporting feat, given that simply getting to the Panjshir could involve a 12-day trek across mountains the height of Mont Blanc. Indeed, some of Gall’s accounts recall Eric Newby’s 1958 classic, A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush, only with Russian bombing raids thrown in too.

Yet the risks were clearly worth it, because Massoud made compelling TV. His aquiline looks and trademark Pakol cap gave him the glamour of an Afghan Che Guevara. Interviewing him over tea and naan bread, Gall could see a man capable of defeating the world’s second superpower. “I was aware of an aura, a mystique that set him apart,” he writes. “He had an air of authority and maturity remarkable in a man of only 28.

Massoud did indeed prove a good choice for MI6. Helped by secret Western training for his lieutenants – some of it done in the grounds of British country estates – his forces withstood years of intensive Soviet assaults, killing thousands of Russians in the process. Thanks largely to their appalling casualty rate in the Panjshir, the Russians began contemplating withdrawal from Afghanistan as early as 1982.

True, Massoud’s men were accused of human rights abuses, but nothing on the scale of the looting and pillaging committed by other mujahideen leaders. Gall contends that he could have been a good leader: a Tito, perhaps, if not quite a Tony Blair.

He makes this case through access to Massoud’s private diaries, which reveal him to be a politician as well as a warrior. Massoud writes about fighting illiteracy and corruption, and frets when his troops lack decent bread to eat. He is also an astute tribal diplomat. When appointing a man of humble birth as a commander, he deftly avoids upsetting the social hierarchy by making sure to pay tribute to the man’s tribal chief.

The diaries, however, are also this book’s weak point, as they are quoted far too extensively. Much as it may have been a publishing coup to get them, only avid Massoud scholars will be interested in his day-to-day jottings about ammo supplies and local elders’ committees. I would have preferred to read more about Gall’s journalistic fieldcraft, which harks back to a lost age of foreign correspondents, long before the advent of risk assessments. Going with the mujahideen into Soviet-era Afghanistan meant spending months incommunicado, with little help if things went wrong. Gall is perhaps too old-school to put himself centre stage, but I’d like to have read more about just how bloody tough it felt.

Some may also accuse Gall of falling too much for the Massoud myth, which, in death, has turned him into a god-like figure. His portrait hangs in many Afghan homes, and there is even a national holiday in his honour. As a salvation figure, though, he is questionable. Massoud was an ethnic Tajik, so any government led by him would have struggled for acceptance by Afghanistan’s larger Pashtun group, which makes up the bedrock of Taliban support.

Few, though, could argue with the warning Massoud made in a letter to the British Government in 1997, in which he said that Afghanistan would become “a base for training terrorists” if left unassisted. Massoud’s old MI6 handler, whom Gall tracks down, says he asked HMG to give more robust backing to “Napoleon” during those later years, but to no avail. “Had help been at hand,” he tells Gall, “the recent history of Afghanistan would be very different.”

Today, the Panjshir Valley is currently the only province of Afghanistan still holding out against the Taliban takeover; resistance there is led by Massoud’s Sandhurst-trained son, Ahmad. The Lion of the Panjshir, it seems, has not lost its roar.

Afghan Napoleon is published by Haus at £25