In the meantime he was thinking on a completely different scale. Massoud had been fighting for twenty-one years, longer than most of the Taliban conscripts had been alive. In that context, Taloqan didn’t matter, the next six months didn’t matter. All that mattered was that the Afghan resistance survive long enough for the Taliban to implode on their own. The trump card of any resistance movement is that it doesn’t have to win; the guerrillas just have to stay in the hills until the invaders lose their will to fight. The Afghans fought off the British three times and the Soviets once, and now Massoud was five years into a war that Pakistan could not support forever. Moreover, the civilian population in Taliban-controlled areas had started to bridle under the conscription of soldiers and the harshness of Taliban law. Last summer, in fact, a full-fledged revolt boiled over in a town called Musa Qaleh, and the Taliban had to send in six hundred troops to crush it. “Every day, I bathe in the river without my pistol,” the local Taliban governor later told a reporter, with no apparent irony. “What better proof is there that the people love us?” The end of the Taliban, it seemed, was only a matter of time.
The Dari word for war is jang, and as Massoud ate his mutton, he explained to his commanders that within weeks he would start a jange-gerilla-yee. Here in the north he was locked into a frontline war that neither side could win, but he had groups of fighters everywhere—even deep in areas the Taliban thought they controlled. “In the coming days, we will engage the Taliban all over Afghanistan,” he announced. “Pakistan brought us conventional war; I’m preparing a guerrilla war. It will start in a few weeks from now, even a few days.”
Massoud had done the same thing to the Soviets. In 1985 he had disappeared into the mountains for three months to train 120 commandos and had sent each of them out across Afghanistan to train 100 more. These 12,000 men would attack the vital supply routes of the cumbersome Soviet Army. They used an operations map that had been found in a downed Soviet helicopter, and they took their orders from Massoud, who had informers throughout the Soviet military, even up to staff general. All across Afghanistan, Russian soldiers traded their weapons for drugs and food. Morale was so bad that there were gun battles breaking out among the Soviet soldiers themselves.
Dinner finished, Massoud spread the map out on the floor and bent over it, plotting routes and firing questions at his commanders. He wanted to know how many tanks they had, how many missile launchers, how much artillery. He wanted to know where the weapons were and whether their positions had been changed according to his orders. He occasionally interrupted his planning to deliver impromptu lectures, his elegant hands slicing the air for emphasis or a single finger shaking in the harsh light of the kerosene lantern. His commanders—many of them older than he, most veterans of the Soviet war—listened in slightly chastised silence, like schoolboys who hadn’t done their homework.
“The type of operation you have planned for tonight might not be so successful, but that’s okay; it should continue,” he said. “This is not our main target. We’re just trying to get them to bring reinforcements so they take casualties. The main thrust will be elsewhere.”
Massoud was so far ahead of his commanders that at times he seemed unable to decide whether to explain his thinking or to just give them orders and hope for the best. The Soviets, having lost as many as fifteen thousand men in Afghanistan, reportedly now study his tactics in the military academies. And here he was, two decades later, still waging war from some bunker, still trying to get his commanders to grasp the logic of what he was doing.
It was getting late, but Massoud wasn’t even close to being finished. He has been known to work for thirty-six hours straight, sleeping for two or three minutes at a time. There was work to do, and his men might die if it wasn’t done well, and so he sat poring over an old Soviet map, coaxing secrets from it that the Taliban might have missed. At one point he turned to one of the young commanders and asked him whether he could fix the hulk of a tank that sat rusting on a nearby hill.
“I have already been up there to see it,” the young man said. “I have fixed tanks much worse than that.”
There were a total of three destroyed tanks; Massoud thought they all could be salvaged. One was stuck in an alleyway between two houses, and the young commander said the passageway was too narrow for them to drag it out. “Buy the houses, destroy them, and get it out,” Massoud said. “Get two more tanks from Rostaq; that’s five. Paint them like new and show them on the streets so people will see them. Then the Taliban will think we’re getting help from another country.”
On and on it went, commander by commander, detail by detail. Don’t shell from Ay Khanom Hill; you’re just wasting your ammunition. Don’t shell any positions near houses or towns; the Taliban are too deeply dug in in those spots and you’ll just hurt civilians. Send your men forward in jeeps to save the heavy machinery and shell heavily beforehand to raise a lot of dust. That way, the Taliban won’t see the attack.
When Massoud was growing up in Kabul, he was part of a neighborhood gang that had regular battles with other gangs. One particularly large gang would occupy a hilltop near his house, and he and his friends would go out and challenge them. Naturally enough, Massoud was the leader. He would split his force, sending one half straight up the hill while the other half circled and attacked from the rear. It always worked. It still worked.
Massoud sat cross-legged on the floor, bent forward at the waist, methodically opening and eating pistachios. His head hung low and swung from side to side as he spoke. He had a slight tic that ran like a shiver up his back and into his shoulders. “Get me your best guys,” he said, looking around. “I don’t want hundreds. I want sixty of your best. Sixty from each commander. Tomorrow I want to launch the best possible war.”
Like so many fundamentalist movements, the Taliban were born of war. After the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan on December 27, 1979, it ultimately sent in eight armored divisions, two enhanced parachute battalions, hundreds of attack helicopters, and well over a hundred thousand men. What should have been the quick crushing of a backward country, however, turned into the worst Soviet defeat of the Cold War. The very weaknesses of the fledgling resistance movement—its lack of military bases, its paucity of weapons, its utterly fractured command structure—meant that the Soviets had no fixed military objectives to destroy. Fighting Afghans was like nailing jelly to a wall; in the end there was just a wall full of bent nails. Initially using nothing but old shotguns, flintlock rifles, and Lee-Enfield .303s left over from British colonial days, the mujahidin started attacking Soviet convoys and military bases all across Afghanistan. According to a CIA report at the time, the typical life span of a mujahidin RPG operator—rocket-propelled grenades were the antitank weapon of choice—was three weeks. It’s not unreasonable to assume that every Afghan who took up arms against the Soviets fully expected to die.