Contemplation through action. If I had to find a phrase that held the reason for the appeal of Massud, the Afghan leader who was murdered two years ago, none could fit better than Michael Barry’s in his biography “Massud. The lion of Panshir”

(Ponte alle Grazie, 286 pages, 15 euros). It is the most moving homage to an exceptional man, who was also the wisest ever to appear on that ideological and political powder keg called Afghanistan.

Massud was not just a military leader, a genre that on the other hand abounds in his country and the basic element of warrior tribalism that partly explains the nation’s upheavals, betrayals, alliances and counter alliances, times of mourning and calamities. He was one of those fighter-philosophers, those rare but significant figures that marked the history of the East and West: his livre de chevet was “The philosopher’s stone of fortune” by the medieval mystic Abu Hamid Al-Ghazali.
He knew Mao and De Gaulle’s theoretical writings and made use of the game of chess as a metaphor to better exemplify the art of war.

He was killed on the eve of the Twin Tower attack.
The attack was under the disguise of a television interview: the television camera exploded after a question, the first and only one, on Osama Bin Laden. Massud lay lifeless, the right side of his body blown to pieces, his arm and leg were crushed to a pulp. His interpreter died on the spot. His aide-de-camp, Mas’ud Chalili found himself without a limb and an eye. One attacker was in turn blown up, while the other was shot down by an unscathed bodyguard. In some way it was an announced death that was hoped for in many ways and by many.

Politically, Massud was the only hope for an independent and sovereign future Afghanistan and hence he was a threat for the Pakistanis, the advocates of their neighbours’ vassallage, an obstacle for the Americans, inclined to have a free hand in their decisions and a danger for the Talibans, forced to try their hands in the ideological sphere instead of the religious one.
Two years after that tragic day the past hope has probably been buried forever: a military protector guarantees the running of current affairs, but only in the capital and its neighbourhood; independent, armed strongholds are flourishing with perspectives that do not surpass their feudal lords’ ethnic group, Taliban enclaves rise along the Pakistani borders and in the country’s most inaccessible areas and there is no chance for an independent and self sufficient policy. Afghanistan exists no more as a state and nation.


Massud was a Tadzhik, a native of the high valley of Panshir, between the villages of Bazarak and Jangalek.
This is not a secondary detail. As Michael Barry explains well, taking up the aforementioned metaphor of chess, “the chessboard enables, rather demands, the most creative strategies, but also dictates its strict rules that no player can afford to violate”. Throughout his life Massud could only move along the diagonals and straight courses permitted by his chessboard, despite the force of his political and military genius.
The outside scene: greedy neighbouring countries. The inside scene: the ethnic mosaic. His starting square: being a Tadzhik, a member of the Persian Sunni strain, probably 40 per cent of the population, against the ethnic Sunni group in the South of Pashtun that has long prevailed and also numbers about 40 per cent, the Shiites of Hazara in Central Afghanistan, about 15 per cent and the remaining minorities.
The curse of modern middle-eastern society remains that of continuing the essential century-old tradition that wants the individual to owe his protection to the family, clan, tribe, ethnic group and sect he belongs to. When the single individual tries to break this rigid picture to claim national unity, the hostility of the other clans immediately drives him back into the suffocating cocoon of his people.

The ethnic element gets even more complicated when it is read in a nationalistic key.
Considering numbers we saw that the Tadzhik and Pashtun are pretty much the same but Afghanistan runs along a border called the Durand line, named after Sir Mortimer Durand, the English officer who traced it in the late 19th century. Besides strategically favouring the powerful neighbour, once India and then Pakistan, it perpetuates the division inside Pashtun territories, practically dividing them in two. Afghanistan has never officially recognized this border, considering it artificial, and has always requested the return or self-determination of the Pashtun territories in Pakistani land and hence the shift from the Pashtun majority that characterized it at the moment of its birth as a sovereign state to the multiethnicism that characterizes it today. But a similar result would make the Tadzhik component a minority. Hence the Tadzhik considered the nationalistic claims of the second half of the 20th century a danger to be avoided and not an ideal battle to be fought. But in some ways this meant colluding with Pakistan, which, obsessed by the Indian and Soviet threat, saw in Afghanistan an objective enemy to be erased.
The interplay of international alliances did the rest and thus Pakistan linked up hand and glove with the United States in an anti-Moscow trend. Afghanistan entered the Russian orbit in an anti-Karachi trend and Panislamism became the card to play for that Tadzhik component, which despite not being nationalist in a Pashtun sense is not pro-communist either. But Panislamism is a double-edged weapon.
A minority marginal trend in a period in which post-colonial nationalisms were strong and the appeal of independence had no rivals, it flourished when the new states suffered an identity crisis or, worse still, the loss of sovereignty. The Afghan case is exemplary in its shift from ally to vassal of the USSR and lastly to military colony.
The fight for freedom then took on the religious attributes that were common to the many ethnic groups, thus softening ethic contrasts.
Besides, support given to Islamism as a vehicle of resistance was practically translated at an international level in Western acceptance, headed by the United States, of Pakistan as a guiding nation for the infiltration and propaganda of Panislamic theories in occupied Afghan territory.
But in this manner the Karachi government proposed to achieve two objectives: the first, in common with its allies, was the military defeat of the USSR and the second, in line with its national interests, was the end of Afghanistan as a sovereign state and its transformation into a political and religious figure with no territorial claims and with extensive opportunities for internal manipulation. That which Pakistan and the others underestimated was the possibility that “Panislamism in just one country” could later wish to export its model to the world, thus entering in contrast with long-standing allies.
And this is what happened when the Talibans came into power. This long but summary digression helps us better understand Massud’s political stature. The future Lion of Panshir was drawn by Panislamism or Fundamentalism, whatever, in his youth: his Tadzhik roots and his refusal of Pashtun nationalism controlled by Moscow lead him to it.
He was also seduced by Maoism, because he saw it as a wedge to be inserted in Kabul’s pro-Soviet policy and as a possible way out of the tight embrace of Fundamentalism.
As the scene changed he realized that the support given to Islamic Mujaheddins was blind in Americans and instrumental in Pakistanis but it was equally converted into the disappearance of Afghanistan as a state. But at the same time he too exploited this support, though in a minor form, in the common commitment against the Soviet invader.
When the latter was forced to leave the scene, there opened the second tragic scene: civil war, when, despite an official invitation, Massud first refused to take on political responsibilities in a Taliban government. He later preferred the course of active resistance in his valley, while waiting for times to improve and for foreign nations to realize the mess they had got themselves into. His death before he was even fifty – he spent half these years fighting – adds the shades of a legend to Massud’s life.

He never lacked in traditional features and a close bond to the traditions and customs of his people but a natural sensitivity enabled him to respect what deserved to be respected and to let fall without a fuss those that were only the passive remains of ancient habits, waste devoid of all meaning.
He was a westerner in a setting that was larger than the one assigned him geographically.
Thus he learnt to understand and know the line of thought and trend of actions of a part of the world that was foreign to him. But he never turned this interest into aping and he never thought of importing models of life and political models as products to be marketed.
In his biography, Michael Barry makes use of Shakespeare’s words in Hamlet’s final act to bid his last farewell: “Good night, sweet prince, and flights of angels sing thee to thy rest”. It is the right goodbye for a philosopher king who did not make it to the throne. Translated by interpres sas