The West have found a new ‘Bin Laden’
Like bin Laden, this young Masoud is being trumped up as a ‘resistance’ hero by the US and its media. He is no longer the terrorist that he was while Ashraf Ghani’s government was in power, with the muscle power of the USA
So they have found their new Bin Laden. Yes, we are talking about this until-now obscure Ahmad Masoud, the new 'resistance' fighter in Punjshir, who has been fighting the Taliban against all odds.
His Internet and mobile connections have been cut off by the Taliban, and yet he has been able to talk very freely with the Western media about the 'difficult' situation he is in, fighting the 'monsters'.
He now seems as the West's last bastion in their attempt to defeat the Taliban after the Western power has been packed out of Kabul, leaving so many bewildered Afghans who had been fed the dream that some foreign powers (read the Americans and the British) will be there to protect them in a land that was never to be a state, with its so many sectarian divides, for a 'unified and democratic' Afghanistan, and which will be peaceful too. Only fools believe that you can have the cake and eat it too.
The West's overreaching imperialism only resulted in the creation of a somnambulistic country without a real government, or even a land. In that deep hypnotic state, people of that mountainous land thought the Americans would prevail forever. They had been fooled into forgetting the past.
They, as well as the rest of the world, bombarded with Western propaganda through their conduits in the form of mighty news channels, had been fed with a distorted version of history in which Bin Laden never existed before the 9/11 attack on the Twin Towers. A history in which Laden had not been to the UK on a secret mission to get ready to fight the secular government of Dr Nazibullah, who was a communist and so an ally of the Soviet Union, the archrival of the West.
People were blinded to the fact, just in the fashion of Chomskyan Manufacturing Truth, that it was the US and its allies that felt a secular government of Nazibullah did not serve their cause, and it was better to arm the myriads of bearded riff-raff mullahs, living off the mountain rocks, and thus pit the Afghans against its own people.
While the Taliban is on a witch-hunt for the US-backed government elements, carrying out a house-by-house search, and while people of liberal beliefs are running from one shelter to another for their dear life, how could a group of women bring out processions against the Taliban in Kabul that even became violent?
The CIA and the British intelligence were at work. The Western media was awash with news of Soviet forces being killed and pulverised every day. There was a joke that all the Soviet soldiers that were reportedly killed in Afghanistan would even surpass the total Soviet population.
It was at that time that the Western media, including the venerable Robert Fisk, wrote reverentially on the Mujahideens and bin Laden, eulogising them as the soldiers of Islam who were giving up everything to fight the aggressors (the Soviets).
And now the Western media have found this supple-looking young man, who does not even look like half a rebel, as the new resistance leader against the Taliban. His name is Ahmad Masoud. It seems after the hasty retreat by the US and its allies, they have hired this guy to fight their war. His father Ahmad Shah Masoud was a brutal warlord too, and awash with French money had taken up arms against the Soviet-backed government. He had a close link with another warlord, Abdul Rashid Dostum.
Like bin Laden, this young Masoud is being trumped up as a 'resistance' hero by the US and its media. He is no longer the terrorist that he was while Ashraf Ghani's government was in power, with the muscle power of the USA. His imbecile look in the Economist story (Who is Ahmad Masoud, the resistant fighter confronting the Taliban fighters in Afghanistan?) makes your blood curdle.
The funny side of the whole Afghan fiasco is that the Western media have been trying to eke out stories of Taliban atrocities despite poor and often contradictory details. Take the CNN story (Women's protest in Taliban-controlled Kabul turns violent) as an example.
While the Taliban is on a witch-hunt for the US-backed government elements, carrying out a house-by-house search, and while people of liberal beliefs are running from one shelter to another for their dear life, how could a group of women bring out processions against the Taliban in Kabul that even became violent? The story does not give any detail of how it turned violent except the voice of someone saying: "Why are you hitting us!"
The fall of the US control over Afghanistan has been aptly explained by Henry Kissinger as that of overstaying in a foreign country by forceful means without any political goal. Such presumptuous behaviour of the US and its allies has resulted in rampant drone attacks that have killed over 70,000 Afghan civilians - men, women and many of them children. Even in the wake of their evacuation from Kabul, the US forces showed what they meant to the Afghan people by conducting a drone attack on a car supposedly on the way to carry out bomb attacks on Kabul airport. The monstrous killing only blew away a few sweet, innocent children and civilians who were in the same car.
And now the West has found this resistance leader, Ahmad Masoud, glossing over his legacy of being just another warlord of equally fundamentalist views of the world, of the women, of liberalism, just because he has pitted himself against the Taliban out of whatever, but surely not out of love for the Afghan people's freedom of speech and expression.
As fast as the Afghan scene is changing, terms are getting messy too. The Taliban were never the resistance fighters - although they were fighting the government of Afghanistan - but the Ahmad Masouds are. The Mujahideen warlords who make up the Taliban are no more the heroes, but Jihadists. The Jihadis, the resistance fighters, the absent government (pro-Ghani) forces are all getting messed up just as the Afghanistan of today is.
