Registan.net

…is more Ahmed Shah Massoud. Seems he’s being exalted as the ideal Afghan, the selfless hero who sacrificed everything for an Afghanistan free of the Taliban. Is that a good idea?

It’s not that he’s already be-sainted as an angel of mercy (a curious image, given his quite well-earned reputation for ferocity on the battlefield), or handled with the awe and reverence usually only reserved for mass murdering communists. It’s that while he was a strong and well-meaning opponent of the Taliban, Massoud was by no means the selfless national hero he is being made out to be. And he was very much on the losing side of that war, barely able to hold on the face of the Taliban’s deep foreign pockets and our own studied indifference to his plight.

With apologies (and thanks) to Afghanistanica, which is providing a lot of the links here, there is a very narrow line between brutal warlord and national hero. While Massoud deserves his reputation as an effective and ingenious tactician, and maybe even as an effective rallying point for the Tajiks he was also part of the disastrous interim government of Burhanuddin Rabbani, and partially responsible for the dreadful Battle of Kabul.

In fact, I suspect that a big part of the reason behind the Massoud PR campaign is a very deep conviction that Afghanistan needs a national hero, some symbol that can be used as a nationalist rallying point to bring everyone together. That such an image distorts reality is beside the point: nationalist symbols and stories are invented from whole cloth all the time (in American history alone, think of the cherry tree and George Washington). And, as effective as Massoud was, he wasn’t a saint, though I would also consider him among the less brutal of the warlords. But Afghanistan itself is seriously in need of some modern day heroes, and the current crop in charge doesn’t really provide any (Hamid Karzai, though popular in the West are really not that bad a leader, has serious credibility issues among the Afghans themselves).

Though a lot of countries can skate by on having a group of heroic Founding Fathers-type figures, they also need interim heroes as well: Abraham Lincoln, Charles de Gaulle, even (less charitably perhaps) Lenin or Mao. A reminder that heroes can still be made is essential to fostering a civic identity, and unfortunately Afghanistan’s recent history hasn’t provided many. I think Massoud might wind up being a choice, though, if given enough time. I just don’t know if there is enough time.

The title is explained here.

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