The dream of controlling Afghanistan lasted only ten days, during which the Taliban movement, whose men grew up among the mountains, experienced wars and were on the lines of fire for two decades, succeeded in regaining power in the country again after ruling it for five years between 1996-2001.
Apparently, the American invasion ended where it began twenty years ago, and the Taliban entered the presidential palace in Kabul, raising their arms and banner, after they had taken control of all parts of the country, and after their fighters had managed to seize all the border crossings with neighboring countries, and then no one could Leave Afghanistan only via Kabul airport.
However, the story of victory was not complete, as the Taliban had not yet fallen to a single Afghan province, Panjshir, which is about 100 kilometers from Kabul, and was never targeted by the movement during its military campaign to control the country for good reasons.
Panjshir has struggled to continually submit to the Taliban, even during the movement's rule in the mid-1990s, while everyone at home and abroad tacitly acknowledged Afghanistan's new rulers, provincial leader Ahmed Masoud wrote in the Washington Post: "I am writing today from the Panjshir Valley, Ready to follow in my father's footsteps, with the mujahideen fighters who are ready to confront the Taliban again, and we have in our possession stores of ammunition and weapons that we have patiently collected, because we knew that this day might come."
Lion of Panjshir
“If Afghanistan is the graveyard of empires, then the Panjshir Valley is the heart of that grave.”
(The war correspondent for the British newspaper "The Times")
The state of Panjshir is located in eastern Afghanistan to surround the valley and river Panjshir bordering the Hindu Kush mountains in one of the most rugged areas in the world. Most of the valley's residents belong to the Sunni sect and to the "Tajiks" ethnicity (also prevalent in their close neighbor Tajikistan), and its people speak the "Dari" language, which the Afghan constitution considers an official language like Pashtun. The population of the province is about 170,000, and they have been the Taliban's staunch enemies since the 1990s. Panjshir means "Five Lions" in Persian, and it is said that the name came after five brothers managed to contain the flood waters and build an impenetrable dam for Sultan Mahmud of Ghaznawi in the tenth century AD.
At a time when the Taliban sent its forces to take control of the city, no one expected it to fall as quickly as Kabul and other provinces in a way that surprised the American forces. Panjshir is difficult for the Taliban, given its long history and complex geography, and the fact that that region witnessed the fiercest battles fought by the Soviet occupation in Afghanistan against the Mujahideen in the period between 1979-1989, when the Panjshir Valley represented a black hole that swallowed the Soviet forces and their equipment, battalion after battalion, at the hands of the Taliban. The famous and legendary Afghan resistance leader Ahmad Shah Massoud, nicknamed the Lion of Panjshir.
Shah Massoud resisted the attacks of the Soviets for years, stubbornly in the face of nine Soviet military attempts to storm the valley to no avail. Street Journal" It's "The Afghan Who Ended the Cold War."
But things did not work out for Shah Massoud and the leaders of the Mujahideen after the departure of the Soviets, and they soon entered into disputes with each other that developed into a civil war.
In that specific atmosphere, the Taliban movement was founded in 1994 from students of religious schools, with full Pakistani support, seeking to present itself as an alternative to the warring Mujahideen.
Therefore, the movement soon found itself in open hostility with Ahmad Shah Massoud and the Jamiat-e-Islami party, one of the most influential Mujahideen parties.
The Taliban succeeded in controlling most of the territory of Afghanistan by 1996, but Shah Massoud succeeded in repelling all the movement's attempts to control the Panjshir Valley, inflicting bitter defeats on its forces, and even tried to present it as a mere bloody militia thirsty for power, unlike the other types of Mujahideen that it polished Soviet resistance.
But after a series of defeats suffered by other movements and states, the balance of power changed in favor of the Taliban throughout Afghanistan, especially with the support it obtained from Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, which eventually helped it declare an Islamic emirate in Afghanistan as a whole, but without being able at the time himself from the possession of Panjshir, so that the valley would stand alone in disobedience and raise the flag of the Northern Alliance, which effectively ruled the valley throughout the communist era.
After fall of Kabul, resistance to Taliban emerges in Panjshir https://t.co/aqF23oZ6HU pic.twitter.com/mQbuDqHdcc
— twashtarsecurity (@twashtarsecure) August 18, 2021
(Photo of the Northern Alliance flag in Panjshir, marking the start of the resistance against the Taliban)
spearhead of resistance
"There is no evidence in Islam to support their extremist views. Nowhere does the Qur'an say that education, health care, and work outside the home are not permissible for women."
(Ahmed Shah Massoud in an interview with an American journalist)
After the power vacuum caused by the flight of Afghan President Ashraf Ghani from the country, his deputy, Amrullah Saleh, a former student of Ahmad Shah Massoud, spearheaded the process of political resistance against the Taliban, declaring himself the interim president of the country according to the Afghan constitution, which grants the deputy the powers of the presidency in the absence of the president. or his resignation or death.
Although the location of "Saleh" is unknown at this moment, he managed to escape from Kabul before the Taliban stormed it, and fled to an unknown destination. It is likely that the "Pangshir" province, which currently includes an anti-Taliban front, is one of the most prominent political and military figures from all over Afghanistan. .
Alongside Saleh, the star of "Ahmed Masoud", 32, is the son of the leader Ahmed Shah Massoud, who was assassinated by Al-Qaeda in 2001, just before the US invasion. Ahmed Masoud is currently forming what is known as the "National Resistance Front" based in Panjshir, trying to attract as many fighters, officials and opponents as possible to the Taliban's continued advance. After the fall of the Afghan capital, these forces fought fierce battles against the new rulers of Afghanistan, and seized three districts in the northern province of Baghlan, an event that the Taliban feared would change the field scene again in Afghanistan if the resistance's victories continued, so it launched a fierce campaign and succeeded in regaining it.
Panjshir seems ready for a long-term struggle against the Taliban, especially with the joining of more than six thousand defectors from the Afghan army and Afghan special forces to the recently declared resistance front, led by Defense Minister General "Basmullah Mohammadi", carrying a number of helicopters with them. Relatively advanced military vehicles and modern military knowledge, given their twenty years of training in the Afghan army, combine for the first time the regular military experience of a venerable armed group such as the Panjshir Alliance.
In addition, hundreds of Taliban resisters from all over the country, who could not stand the Taliban tide in their respective states, poured out, all of whom fled to their last and most fortified stronghold in the valley that had long eluded the Taliban.
Defense Minister General "Bismillah Mohammadi"
Peace or civil war?
"We are communicating with the people of Panjshir, and we are talking to their elders, the influential in their ranks and their jihadi leaders, and the talks will soon lead to a solution to the problem without starting a war. I am 80% confident that we will not need war, and according to my information, we are close to a peace agreement."
(Zabihullah Mujahid, Taliban spokesman)
The latest field developments indicate that the Taliban imposed a siege around the city, a strategy aimed at preventing the arrival of new angry people to the region, and blocking the way for any possible military aid after the resistance leaders appealed to external parties to provide them with weapons and equipment to overthrow the new government.
The region's leaders are betting, then, on the possibility of receiving support, secretly or openly, from parties that will not recognize the Taliban for an old ideological enmity with the movement, led by Tajikistan, the northern neighbor of Afghanistan, which did not prevent the Afghan embassy on its soil from placing a picture of Amrullah Saleh as interim head of the state, not to mention the support of the ambassador The former Tajik openly formed a nucleus in Panjshir to expel the Taliban.
God's command is good
India may also find in the emerging resistance in the region an ally, especially since it had previously provided military and economic support during the nineties to the Northern Alliance led by Ahmed Shah Massoud in its war against the Taliban, which is a logical support given the strong alliance between the Taliban and the military and intelligence establishment in Pakistan, the archenemy for India. However, neither India nor Tajikistan alone can give enough weight to tip the scales inside Kabul, especially in light of the tendency of heavier international and regional powers to recognize the new regime and their desire to coordinate with it, such as the United States, which has been negotiating with the Taliban for years, and China and Russia, which have shown relative openness On the Taliban, which are international powers much heavier than India, and similarly attend Turkey, Iran and Pakistan to different degrees, which are of course heavier countries than Tajikistan.
As a result, Western diplomats and some Afghan forces are skeptical about the ability of this new alliance to wage effective resistance against the Taliban, which now has support beyond its usual popular bases due to its reputation as an anti-American resistance movement, making it one of its strongest political and military moments.
This skepticism is supported by what Ahmed Masoud and his brother alluded to in their statements about the possibility of reaching a political settlement with the Taliban.
This trend appeared in an intervention made by the leader of the Panjshir resistance with the Saudi “Al Arabiya” channel, in which he declared that he had no problem with a government in which the Taliban would participate, and that Afghanistan needed an inclusive government, saying: “We are ready for dialogue with the Taliban, and we are also ready to fight and we will not surrender.” ".
The statements of Shah Massoud's son seem enthusiastic rather than threatening, and they are also a message that his movement is ready for dialogue, but it will not accept the Taliban's monopoly of power without participation.
Son of Shah Massoud, "Leader of the Panjshir Resistance"
On both the military and political sides, then, Panjshir alone determines the future of the conflict in Afghanistan, and with it the future of the Taliban in power. Perhaps a quick war would strengthen the Taliban’s ability to rule alone, and perhaps the long steadfastness of the Black Valley would lead to an unwanted setback. Therefore, the movement carefully calculates its cards and continues to besiege the rebel region on its authority to prevent the growth of its power. At the same time, negotiations continue between the two parties in order to reach a peaceful settlement that Taliban leaders expressed confidence in reaching.
It is true that history is on the side of Ahmed Masoud, but the present and exceptional moment in the history of the Taliban after the departure of the American invasion clearly tilts the hand of the Taliban. But at the same time, the movement realizes that entering Panjshir by force - assuming it can - will be military and politically costly, not to mention its negative repercussions on its reputation and international relations. On the other hand, Ahmed Masoud and his companions realize that the balance of military and political power is in the interest of the Taliban. Negotiation, therefore, remains the only reasonable solution for the two parties, but the fundamental question today relates to the price that the Taliban are willing to pay in order to enter the Black Valley in peace, after failing to subjugate it by force for many years.