Don't believe the lies about a 'softer Taliban'

Don't believe the lies about a 'softer Taliban'
Taliban viewpoint
Colin Brazier

By Colin Brazier


Published: 19/08/2021

- 20:38

Updated: 20/08/2021

- 00:01

We may not be able to save Afghanistan, but might the West’s military, help provide a safe haven in the Panshir?

Two days before the 9/11 attacks in America, two men arrived in Afghanistan from Belgium to interview someone called Ahmad Shah Masoud. He was a hard man to find, so this was a journalistic scoop.

Masoud was the most wanted man in Afghanistan, wanted that is, by the Taliban. In the 1990s he’d led resistance against them, just as he’d fought against the Soviets in the 1980s.But the journalists he’d agreed to speak with weren’t there to hear his words of defiance, they were suicide bombers sent to kill him.


It’s thought they probably got past Masoud’s security guards by hiding explosives inside a camera tripod. 48-hours after Masoud’s assassination, Al Qaeda’s attacks on New York and Washington began. Islamists in Afghanistan knew that, after 9/11, the West would seek revenge and that Ahmad Shah Masoud would be their sword. So they murdered him before he could become an American proxy. Why do I share this story?

Well, Masoud’s killing reminds us that the Taliban and Islamist terrorists may not always want the same things, but they tend to hate the same people. The Taliban may be on Twitter but they’re really on a different planet, and that’s likely to become apparent once they show their true colours. As one of the great authorities on the Taliban, Ahmed Rashid, said this week, when the Taliban took charge of Afghanistan the first time, they started out with a public relations drive, just as they have now.

In the 1990s they pledged to stop corruption and start handing out food. But then reality started to bite. The economy, never Afghanistan’s strong point, went to pot. There were food shortages and an explosion in heroin use. And finally the bits we remember, the Taliban desperate to hang onto power imposing the world’s harshest version of Sharia law.

Not just the bans on music and shaving, but the beheadings in football stadiums, amputations on an industrial scale and the disappearance of women. Until last week more than a thousand women worked in the media in Afghanistan. How many do you think will be so engaged this time next year?

But there’s something else about Ahmad Shah Masoud’s murder. His son still lives. He went to Sandhurst. And he may yet inherit his father’s nickname – the Lion of the Panshir. The Panshir Valley is again the last part of Afghanistan holding out against the Taliban, just as it did when Ahmad Shah Masoud was still alive.

We may not be able to save Afghanistan, but might the West’s military, help provide a safe haven in the Panshir, the only one of Afghanistan’s 34 districts not to have fallen to the Taliban? There are already reports that surviving Afghan army units have fallen back there, as well as thousands of Shia refugees. Of course, whatever else the Taliban are, they are students of history.

They will try and subjugate the Panshir. If they don’t, it might become a centre of Resistance again, just as it was after 9/11.

I was in Afghanistan in those late months of 2001 with troops loyal to Ahmad Shah Masoud. Every Northern Alliance vehicle carried his picture. Western forces could not, or would not, stop the Taliban’s recent conquests.

But surely, in the Panshir, they have the chance to help those who would provide a sanctuary against the Taliban’s looming barbarism. That’s tonight’s Viewpoint.

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