The Lion of Sabray

by Patrick Robinson

  Led by the mullah, thirty Taliban warriors, with only sixteen rifles among them, charged in, freed the girls, and promptly hanged the governor from the gun barrel of a tank. This brought instant fame, and quickly there were fifteen thousand more students from the madrassas of Pakistan on the march, crossing the Afghan border and heading for the mullah’s new Taliban stronghold in Kandahar.

  By late 1994, Mullah Omar had an army. It was badly equipped and low on munitions, but its core was Pashtun, and its warriors brought with them generations of war-fighting instincts. That year, led by the mullah, they assembled in Maiwand, a small village fifty miles west of Kandahar. Although insignificant today, Maiwand carries enormous notoriety in the annals of Afghanistan’s military history.

  Because here on July 27, 1880, on the plains of Kandahar Province, the Afghan armed forces, commanded by Mohammed Ayub Khan, inflicted one of the most serious defeats ever sustained by the British army in India. They lost almost a thousand men, with another two hundred wounded, from two entire brigades commanded by Brigadier General George Burrows, a decorated hero who helped put down the Indian mutiny.

  Ayub Khan, his infantry blasted by British artillery, lost in excess of three thousand, but his huge force of twenty-five thousand Afghan warriors overwhelmed the British and Indian invaders, and in the end routed them. Contemporary description of the decisive assault describes the British left flank “giving way and rolling as a great wave to the right, swept away by the pressure of the Afghan attack.”

  To this day, the Battle of Maiwand stands infamous in British history—still referred to, colloquially, as “My God! Maiwand.” For when that left flank gave way, the Sixty-Sixth Regiment of Foot (the Berkshire Regiment) was almost wiped out. The regimental commanding officer, Lieutenant Colonel James Galbraith, led the final fifty-six of his troops into a mud-walled garden in the nearby scattering of huts at Khig. And there, on the edge of a ravine, against more than twenty thousand Pashtuns, they made their last stand.

  The colonel died holding the regimental colors aloft, and with just eleven men of the Sixty-Sixth still fighting and still inflicting huge losses on their enemy, they elected to charge out of the garden and die in battle.

  An elaborately framed account of this action, written by an Afghan artillery officer, hangs prominently in a London museum. It reads:

  These men charged from the shelter of a garden, and died with their faces to the enemy, fighting to the death. So fierce was their charge, and so brave their actions, no Afghan dared to approach to cut them down.

  So, standing in the open, back to back, firing steadily, every shot counting, surrounded by thousands, these British soldiers died. It was not until the last man was shot down that the Afghans dared to advance on them. The behavior of those last eleven was the wonder of all who saw it.

  Infamous as a massacre in England and glorious as a victory in Afghanistan, the name Maiwand is commemorated in art and literature in many places, from Kabul to Reading in Berkshire, England. And there one of the largest cast-iron statues in the world, the thirty-one-foot Maiwand Lion, stands on a pedestal near the center of town, in tribute to the 328 local men who died in that far-flung battle in the Second Anglo-Afghan War.

  Maiwand thus became a military byword, and there is none greater in the Afghan language. And in 1994, with a commendable sense of history, that was the place Commander Mullah Omar chose for his Taliban starting point on a relentless march toward power.

  On that morning, he set off with his untested Taliban troops to conquer Kandahar, in the footsteps of the immortal Ayub Khan. Perched three thousand feet above sea level, this is Afghanistan’s second largest city, and a major trading center for wool, cotton, and silk. Kandahar is a fertile growing area for fruit, grains, and tobacco, with two other prime distinctions: it is the spiritual capital of the Pashtun nation, and the pomegranate capital of the world.

  When Mullah Omar reached the city in 1994, many Pashtun tribal leaders, warlords, and commanders surrendered almost immediately to his largely Pashtun army. For the first time in many months, a semblance of order was restored in Kandahar, where total lawlessness had reigned and a succession of atrocities had terrified the population.

  The Taliban warriors grabbed border crossing points, ammunition dumps, and militia strongholds, while seizing twelve more surrounding provinces not under Afghan government control. The mullah’s views were stern, but there was relief among the people for the discipline and control that he imposed.

  The final area of uncontrolled Afghani warfare was in Kabul itself, 135 miles from the Sabray area. Several militia leaders were striving to take the city, fighting one another as well as the government army. The militias didn’t possess the discipline and determination of Mullah Omar’s veterans, and they were all defeated roundly by the well-ordered Afghani troops, led by the Islamic State’s brilliant minister for defense, Ahmad Shah Massoud, a truly formidable man known locally as the Lion of Panjshir.

  Massoud, a highly decorated mujahideen commander, had defeated the Red Army in Gulab’s northeastern mountains thirteen times in the 1980s. The Soviets finally just gave up and completely stopped trying to fight Afghanistan’s greatest military leader on his home territory around the village of Jangalak in the Panjshir Valley. Gulab speaks of him with immense respect:

  Everyone knew of Commander Massoud. He was a government minister who had personally taken up the sword, to defend his country. Such men are rare, even in my land of quiet, devout heroes. And this man was extraordinary: a politician and an inspired military tactician; a lover of poetry, and a man of magnetic personality; a battle commander whose stature and authority seemed to surge up from the rose-brown sandy Pashtun earth upon which he stood.

  The exploits of Commander Massoud have now passed into folklore; our children are taught of his ways and his strategies. They say that in the high valleys, on certain evenings, the thunder of his guns may still be heard. Twelve years after his cruel and barbaric assassination at the hands of bin Laden’s suicide bombers, the Lion of Panjshir will not be silenced.

  I speak of this Afghan giant not just because we fought for the same holy cause, at the same time, in similar country. But because I knew him as a neighbor, since the Panjshir Valley is situated in a range of mountains northwest of Sabray.

  The residents are fellow Pashtuns and have been our good friends for generations. Like us, the men of the Panjshir have a fierce streak of independence. And when the Russians marched into our country, the men of that beautiful valley rose up as one, and, like us, declared holy war on the invading infidels.

  Like us, they were prepared to fight to the death, and it was from their land of plenty, redolent with mulberry trees and other fruit orchards, that the great mujahideen commander came to us. Down the centuries, the Panjshir people had always journeyed over the mountains to Sabray and stayed with us on their way to the Pakistan border.

  With the onset of war against the Soviets, they were quite frequent visitors, with many families leaving for Pakistan; merchants and dealers heading for the border for trade; even military personnel going to the border mysteriously, perhaps to receive armaments or even Pakistani cash to finance and supply our war effort.

  And that was where Ahmad Shah Massoud entered our lives. He came from across those mountains, on a journey to the border, and was greeted by us in long-standing friendship. I forget the actual date, but on this night, he came at dusk and dined with the elders. But it suddenly snowed, heavily. Great blizzards howled across the Hindu Kush peaks, and when we awoke at first light, we were in a white world, and it was obvious that Commander Massoud and his bodyguards were going nowhere.

  This was not a sudden, intense winter storm. This was winter, arriving with a flourish and locking us all into our village for the duration. The only way out was downward, but that was impossible for Massoud, because the Russian army at the time was encamped way below us, and while they would never have the nerve to come up and attack, neither would we hav
e the nerve to go down and confront them face-on. Right here we had a winter standoff, and that night it snowed again.

  Ahmad Shah Massoud was about to spend the dark, cold months in Sabray, where there was a lot of fuel, plenty of heat, well-stored food, and much to discuss. He did not seem in any way depressed by this and quickly joined a fellow Pashtun community with routines and practices with which he was quite familiar.

  We were in the mid- to late 1980s, and I was a very young gunnery officer. Commander Massoud would sit among all of the mujahideen warriors who fought for the same cause, and endlessly discuss strategy. A master of ambush, and a ruthless tactician, he told us of great victories of the recent past and outlined even greater ones yet to come.

  I remember his confidence, his certainty that Allah fought alongside us, and that He would guide us to the very end, until the Soviets left. Technically, he was a supreme exponent of war, and it was not difficult to understand he had earned an engineering degree at the University of Kabul in the 1970s.

  In some ways, he spoke as an engineer, with careful talks on the angles of gunfire, the importance of machine gun placement, of skillfully laid mines and bombs, the crucial aspects of timing—not too early with our detonations, never too late.

  There was no doubt he was a master, and his subjects were the only ones I had ever known. I loved talking to him, and he was always both patient and generous—a help to everyone in Sabray that winter. And before the snows had melted, he had made us better, and in the battles to come, we would be sharper than ever; more thoughtful, better planners, more strategic.

  He spoke long and often with our village elders, he prayed with us constantly, and his hatred of Communism was an inspiration, occupied as we officially were by the Red Army. He also disliked the many militias that caused so much trouble and unhappiness in our country. He was avowed to rid Afghanistan of all of them: Russians, warlords, and anyone else who hindered our possibilities for peace and prosperity.

  We all watched the commander marching with his men resolutely up toward the Pakistan border after the snow melted. I was sad to see him leave, and I never saw him again.

  Ten years passed, to the mid-nineties, and the rise of the Taliban seemed unstoppable. Mullah Omar’s troops carried most of the country before them, and the only barrier to their seizing total power was Commander Massoud, who did not approve of their fundamentalist interpretation of Islam, hated their harsh treatment of women, and believed their many versions of the Koran did not follow the true teachings of the Prophet.

  In the West, his destruction of sections of the Soviet army had made him, well, lionized. The Wall Street Journal once described him as “The Afghan Who Won the Cold War.” And now he had a new enemy, Mullah Omar’s Taliban, which was rapidly joining Sheik Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda, not to mention almost thirty thousand Pakistani troops, sent to help the mullah and the sheik get Afghanistan under control.

  Thus armed and primed, the one-eyed mullah understood he needed to attack and seize the capital, Kabul, and take command of the country. In 1995 he began shelling the city and, with his troops on the march, unaccustomed to anything but victory, the Taliban stormed toward the outer ramparts.

  And there they ran into a wall of fire, as the Islamic State’s forces, commanded brilliantly by Ahmad Shah Massoud, cut them down in droves. The master of the ambush proceeded to inflict a devastating defeat upon the Taliban, unleashing a withering machine gun barrage, which even the Soviets had never been able to withstand.

  The Taliban retreated, cut up and decimated, and with profound hatred in their hearts for the victorious Lion of Panjshir. Their losses were heavy, but they were reinforced by Pakistan, which was sending in thousands and thousands of soldiers—possibly up to thirty thousand. And these joined the fourteen thousand Afghan Taliban fighters, and three thousand of bin Laden’s Al Qaeda militants, all fighting Commander Massoud.

  Massoud had no wish for his army to commit suicide, nor to fight street battles in Kabul, so he retreated north to his homeland in the Hindu Kush, still avowed to fight the Taliban. His reputation was sealed as the commander in chief of the Northern Alliance.

  On September 27, 1996, Mullah Omar’s army entered Kabul unopposed and established the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan. It was a regime that would be ever favorable to Pakistan, and one of its first actions was to accept an invitation from Ahmad Shah Massoud to meet in Maidan Shar, twenty-five miles southwest of Kabul, to plan a future government for Afghanistan.

  The Taliban turned up but declined to cooperate. It was later learned that the Taliban leader who greeted Commander Massoud was shot dead for not taking an obvious chance to personally execute the revered government minister from the Panjshir Valley.

  Massoud’s acute dislike of the Taliban understandably increased. And on an almost weekly basis, he was hearing of unimaginably cruel actions by Mullah Omar’s men. It was, after all, an army that had begun its reign with thousands of frenzied students hanging a provincial governor from the gun barrel of a tank. If anything, its bloodthirsty instincts grew worse, and its propensity to stone women to death for alleged adultery angered Ahmad Shah Massoud hugely.

  He was still the one man in the north of the country with whom the Taliban dreaded to tangle. Commander Massoud was vociferous in his condemnation of their creeds and methods, and he was never even remotely afraid of them. He just plain did not approve of the Taliban.

  One of his most famous statements was: “It is our conviction, and we believe, that both men and women were created by the Almighty. Both have equal rights. Women can pursue an education, women can pursue a career, and women can play a role in society . . . just like men.”

  In the end, the Taliban leadership—likely in consultation with bin Laden—accepted that there was only one way to take over Massoud’s one-third of the country, and that was to get rid of him.

  Bin Laden sent a team posing as journalists, with bombs hidden in their cameras, to the commander’s offices in Takhar Province, way up in the north of the country on the Tajikistan border. Takhar is a big place with a thousand villages and almost a million people, and its name will live in notoriety because of what happened there on September 9, 2001.

  The terrorists detonated their bombs, blasting Commander Massoud across the room. Desperate doctors and medics rushed to help, and a military helicopter came in to evacuate him to a field hospital. Sadly, he died before he got there. Ahmad Shah Massoud was only forty-eight. Gulab says quietly, “I’ve always thought it was awful that the great resistance fighter should have died at the hands of cowards—men who were not even brave enough to identify themselves.”

  Massoud was the finest mujahideen commander of the second half of the twentieth century, a man of enormous accomplishments. Had he lived, the Americans might never have sent troops to Afghanistan. And his death brought terrible sadness to the people of Kunar and throughout the entire country.

  He was the only Afghan chief who never left the country throughout the wars against the Soviets and the Taliban, and within weeks of his death, he was declared a National Hero of Afghanistan.

  “I still remember those September days,” says Gulab, “and the pall of sorrow which settled over our country, especially in the northern and eastern mountains. And we instantly blamed the followers of this strange war-loving Saudi cleric, Osama bin Laden, who reputedly lived high in our mountains, northeast of Sabray.” He continues:

  I never went up there, but there were many rumors and stories about him; how he provided large amounts of cash to recruit and train his killers in camps which were constructed on the slopes of the giant escarpments.

  His Saudi nationality was unusual. There are not that many millionaire Arabs from Riyadh living in caves in the Hindu Kush, trying to persuade kids to commit suicide while blowing up his various perceived enemies. And then there was his apparent commitment to Mullah Omar’s Taliban, the joint training camps, and shared desire for an all-powerful tribal council which would rule Afgha
nistan.

  Bin Laden was politically clueless; otherwise he would never have dreamed of assassinating Ahmad Shah Massoud, a man to whom a large part of Afghanistan was unashamedly devoted. What could he possibly hope to gain by alienating almost half the nation, in the land which was currently sheltering him from his enemies?

  The workings of this mind will doubtless continue to baffle people for many years to come. And on September 10, 2001, a million questions were permeating the national sadness over the murder of the towering mujahideen commander.

  Little did we know, bin Laden’s presence would become even more prominent just one day later, when the Saudi killer would make world headlines.

  When bin Laden’s terrorists flew those planes into Manhattan’s World Trade Center, we were slow to find out. In the Hindu Kush, it was nine and a half hours further on. So Sabray was in twilight when the planes hit the towers. And because we had no electricity, most villagers went to bed when it was too dark to see and awakened when the sun began to rise up over the eastern peaks of the Himalayas.

  Thus it was morning when our first radios were turned on and we heard that there were almost three thousand dead. It wasn’t long before we also heard that the USA was about ready to declare war on anyone who was sheltering Osama bin Laden.

  And we truly had no idea what this would ultimately mean for us. Osama bin Laden had always seemed remote from us: he was backed by Pakistan and apparently fled to that country. He was most certainly not Pashtun, nor even an Afghan.

  Understand, we had no television, and our radio reception was erratic. No one had the slightest idea what those two gigantic skyscrapers looked like, either when they were hit by the aircraft, or afterward, when they had both caved in.

  And it was likely forgotten that our beloved martyred Commander Massoud had addressed the European Parliament five months previously in April 2001 and issued a warning. He stated that his intelligence network had “gained limited knowledge” about an imminent large-scale terrorist attack on US soil.