Massoud’s Last Conquest

by Sebastian Junger, published in Vanity Fair – February 2002

Afghanistan’s master guerrilla commander, Ahmed Shah Massoud, was assassinated by suspected al-Qaeda suicide bombers just two days before September 11. But his Northern Alliance coalition became the U.S.’s most important weapon against the Taliban in a war that combined 19th-century slaughter and 21st-century technology. As alliance soldiers marched on Kabul—with a massed-infantry assault amid the deadly shadows of B-52 bombers—the author saw Massoud’s legacy revealed, in the Afghans’ hatred of foreigners fighting for the Taliban, in their readiness to die for freedom, and even, poignantly, in one man’s act of mercy.

~~~

An unnatural fluttering of the plastic over our windows woke me. It sucked in and snapped back three times, as if the whole world were out of breath, and then it lay quiet.

A gray light leaked into the room. Dogs were barking somewhere across the fields. I got up and pulled on my clothes and climbed onto the mud roof of the house we were staying in. The moon was midway in the sky, waning toward Ramadan, and the east was shot with red. A single B-52 bomber was making its way silently across the sky at 30,000 feet, laying four thin contrails out behind. It continued past me and then made a perfect arc far to the south, where the front lines were.

I couldn’t hear the bombs—they were 20 miles away—but I could feel them: four distinct pressure waves in the air that bumped past me and on up the valley. A few days earlier I’d talked to a mujahid who had fought the Russians in the 1980s. He described a Russian rocket hitting the mouth of a cave he was hiding in. The explosion itself didn’t touch him, he said, but the concussion had made his ears and eyes bleed for days. That was just a Russian rocket; these were 2,000-pound bombs.

The Americans had been bombing Taliban air-defense and command-and-control bunkers across the country for a month, but it was only a few days earlier that they actually started to hit fighters on the front line. We had been waiting weeks for that to happen, speculating that diplomatic pressure from Pakistan was causing the delay. When the frontline bombing finally started, however, it was ferocious. Northern Alliance troops listened in on Taliban radio frequencies and said they could hear the Taliban screaming in their bunkers as the bombs came down; they said they could hear commanders vainly trying to contact positions that had existed only minutes before. One Taliban survivor said that 3 out of 10 men on the front line were killed before the fighting even began. At one site in Kabul, 270 foreign volunteers—mainly Arabs and Pakistanis—were killed in a single bombing run. Sixty of them were never found; they just became more Afghan dust. Locals buried what was left of the other 210.

I went back down from the roof to make some coffee. A major offensive was supposed to start within days; 12,000 Northern Alliance troops would hurl themselves at the Taliban lines and battle their way toward Kabul. The Northern Alliance had been fighting the Taliban since the mid-90s, and the State Department had been looking for Osama bin Laden for even longer. What was about to happen was a rare convergence of the interests of the most powerful nation in the world and one of the poorest. And neither could get what it wanted without the other.

I’d been in a town called Jabal Saraj—well removed from the front line—for a week or more, but now it was time to move south. I was working with three other journalists; we packed our trucks with food and cameras and flak jackets and a spare generator, and started off through the ruined fields and gutted towns of the Shomali Plain. I left most of my gear in Jabal, but I had an army rucksack with a sleeping bag and a few personal things, as well as a copy of the Koran. I tried to read it whenever we were waiting around for something, but it was slow going; like much of the Bible, it seemed to be just a long series of miseries and injunctions. One of the early lines was startling, though: This book is not to be doubted.

Those were fittingly stern words from a God that presided over such brutal terrain, such tortured history. The Afghans have been fighting for 23 years. Well over 5 percent of the population have been killed; more than a quarter have been displaced from their homes. Infant mortality is around 25 percent.

Tomorrow, or the next day, or the day after that, we would witness something few journalists have ever seen: a massed-infantry assault through minefields on entrenched enemy positions. Almost no one fights like that anymore—except in Afghanistan. We drove down to the front that afternoon; by nightfall, word had come that Mazar-e-Sharif, the most important Taliban stronghold in the North, had fallen.

The offensive had begun.

~~~

Last April, a delegation of Afghans arrived in Paris to plead their case with the French government and the European Parliament. At their head was Ahmed Shah Massoud, the Tajik guerrilla fighter who almost single-handedly was holding together the fractious Northern Alliance against the Taliban. With him were commanders—some would call them warlords—from the Uzbek, Hazara, and Pashtun populations. Massoud had often been accused of seeking a regime dominated by Tajiks; his decision to bring along other commanders seemed to be a message to the world that the time was right for a multi-ethnic Afghan government.

These men had grown up in villages where rice was still winnowed by hand and houses were made of wattle and mud. They had fought the Russians for 10 years, and the Taliban for another 5. With the exception of quick trips to Pakistan or Tajikistan, none of them had ever been out of their beautiful, war-ruined country. They landed at Le Bourget, the military airport outside Paris, were greeted on the tarmac by a woman in a short skirt, and then were taken by full diplomatic escort to the Hotel Plaza Athénée.

Massoud wore his customary safari jacket and pakul cap and was addressed as “commandant” by the awestruck hotel staff. The rich French food didn’t agree with him, and he asked the embassy to hire a cook from a local Afghan restaurant. He was lodged in a beautiful suite with 18th-century furniture and a television. Word quickly rippled through the Afghan delegation not to turn the television on, because there were “dangerous”—i.e., pornographic—channels they might stumble onto. In some interpretations of Islam, even thinking about a woman other than your wife qualifies as a sin, and one bearded commander was observed gripping his armchair and praying, eyes closed, as a young French woman walked by.

While his commanders struggled and prayed, Massoud worked. He worked 18 hours a day, five days straight, meeting with journalists, with top-level ministers, with Bernard Kouchner, the founder of Médecins sans Frontières and former head of the U.N. mission in Kosovo, and with the entire European Parliament. His message was simple: Force Pakistan to stop supporting the Taliban regime and the war will end within the year. In addition, he asked for humanitarian help with the refugees and military help for the Northern Alliance, but that was secondary. Mainly, he warned that if Pakistan was not ostracized for its support of the Taliban, Afghanistan would continue to be a haven for terrorism and extremism. Ultimately, he said, the West would pay a terrible price.

“If I could say one thing to President Bush,” Massoud said at a press conference, “it would be that if he doesn’t take care of what is happening in Afghanistan the problem will not only hurt the Afghan people but the American people as well.”

The Taliban were riddled with informers, and Massoud regularly received information about Pakistan’s actions in Afghanistan and also about al-Qaeda. The foreign volunteers—mostly Arabs, many of them al-Qaeda—were the best fighters on the Taliban side, and had often held the line when regular Taliban positions were being overrun. Although American foreign policy was still stubbornly pro-Pakistani, some counterterrorism agents in the United States had decided to go the other way. Last summer I met with a high-level American intelligence officer who told me bluntly, “Counterterrorism means getting bin Laden, and the best way to do that is to help Massoud.”

He didn’t go into specifics, but it was clear that Massoud was feeding intelligence to the United States in exchange for some form of aid. It was a refreshingly practical solution to the terrorism problem, and it was clearly going to change the balance of power in the region. For decades, the United States had essentially followed Pakistan’s lead when it came to an Afghan policy. During the Soviet occupation, America relied on Pakistan to put $3 billion worth of weapons and support into the hands of the mujahideen. It was all funneled through the ISI, the infamous Pakistani intelligence service, and many of the weapons wound up in the hands of anti-Western fanatics.

The power vacuum that followed the 1989 Soviet withdrawal was finally filled by the Taliban, the creation of fundamentalist lunatics recruited by the ISI from the refugee camps on the Afghan border. By 1996, Pakistan had created a rogue state that exported two-thirds of the world’s heroin, brutalized its citizens with harsh Islamic laws, and hosted a terrorism network dedicated to destroying the West. The C.I.A. has a word for this: blowback. The Taliban are blowback; bin Laden is blowback; September 11 is the ultimate example of blowback. Blowback is what happens when a shortsighted policy comes back to haunt America in ways that are more dangerous than the original threat.

Blowback was a military problem, strictly speaking, and it hadn’t troubled the State Department unduly. American paranoia about Iran and Soviet-aligned India dictated an unwavering support of Pakistan, and the possibility of an oil-and-gas pipeline across Afghanistan from Turkmenistan had lured a consortium of Western oil companies into negotiating directly with the Taliban regime. While American counterterrorism efforts struggled to contain the threat posed by Osama bin Laden, oil interests and Pakistani intelligence were holding American policy firmly by the ear.

Very slowly, however, elements in the American government were realizing how flawed and dangerous that strategy was. Sometime during 2000, they were considering another solution: Ahmed Shah Massoud.

~~~

By all accounts, the taking of Mazar-e-Sharif on November 10 was a bloodbath. American bombs blew holes in the front line, and Arab volunteers found it necessary to threaten their Afghan brothers with execution if they tried to defect. Tajiks under Commander Atta attacked from the south, and Uzbeks under General Dostum attacked from the north and east. The Uzbeks are known among Afghans for the utter carelessness with which they regard their own lives and for their terrible cruelty toward their enemies. Some attack on horseback with RPGs over their shoulders. There were 300 Taliban dead in Mazar, and they did not all die fighting.

After Mazar fell, the Taliban front line unzipped from north to south practically by the hour: Sheberghan, Samangan, Kholm, Baghlan, Pul-e-Kumri, Bamian. Every time a town fell, one of the soldiers we were with would come running, radio in hand, to announce it. We were now staying in a mud fortress with an overgrown courtyard and a pile of live Russian bombs in the corner. It was the headquarters of the governor of Bagram, and it had gunports in the walls and no electricity and no heat and no plumbing except for a mud outhouse tucked in one corner among the weeds. For $50 a day we could all sleep on the floor in one of the rooms, and for another $10 we would be given mutton and rice every night. And from the roof we could watch the Americans bomb the front lines only a couple of miles away.

The next morning we drove the last half-mile down to the front positions with a Northern Alliance political adviser who had turned up at our compound. He squeezed into our truck and told us that Northern Alliance intelligence was passing information about Arabs along to the Americans for bombing purposes, but they were keeping the Pakistanis for themselves.

“I don’t care about Arabs, I just want the Punjabis,” he said, using the local word for Pakistani.

“What will you do with them?”

“I’ll kill them.”

It was a matter of some outrage among Afghans that foreigners were in their country fighting a civil war. There is a lot of forgive-and-forget among the Afghans themselves—Dostum had fought for the Soviets for years—but outsiders are a different story. The British lost over 15,000 soldiers and civilians when they invaded Afghanistan in the early 1840s. Their bones, according to local legend, are still bleaching on a hillside outside Kabul. The Russians lost 15,000 men during their disastrous 10-year attempt to pacify the Afghans. The Pakistanis had some 15,000 fighters with the Taliban. Seduced by the rhetoric of extremist Islam, they had come to the mountains of Afghanistan prepared to die. And die they would.

~~~

This is where the dying would happen next: Bagram air base, a military facility built with Soviet aid in the 1950s, 35 miles north of Kabul. Bagram had changed hands three times in the past few years; now the Northern Alliance held it, but the Taliban front lines were just on the far side of the tarmac. The control tower was a shattered hulk of concrete with a blast hole in the sagging roof. Trees had grown up around it from 10 years of disuse. Scattered across the airfield below were rusting fuel trucks and the carcasses of destroyed Russian fighter planes and a couple of tanks with their turrets knocked off.

A logistics officer, who was responsible for bringing food and ammunition up to the forward trenches, took us into the control tower for a look. He said that the preceding week the Taliban had shot at anyone they saw in the tower, but this week it didn’t seem to be a problem. We hoped he was right. We sat in the warm sun, passing around cigarettes, and watched through binoculars the Taliban bunkers smoking from a carpet bombing earlier that morning. One of the soldiers we were with, a teenager named Ahmad, picked up a two-way radio and punched in a Taliban military frequency. He found a Taliban soldier who was trying to locate a friend of his named Rafardeh.

“Rafardeh is dead,” Ahmad said.

“I’m asking for Rafardeh,” the Talib said again.

“Yeah, he’s dead.”

Ahmad went on to gloat on the radio over the towns that had fallen in the past 24 hours: Sheberghan, Mazar, Baghlan …

“Well, prepare your wives,” the Talib answered. “Wash them well because we’re coming. It’s our turn now.”

Another American bomb hit on the far side of the valley, and a dark column of smoke rose and dissipated in the pale-blue sky. The concussion reached us 20 seconds later. I could see plumes of dust on the plain from trucks that were resupplying the Taliban positions. Ahmad dialed around again and found another enemy soldier to talk to.

“Here’s the password,” he said. “Tahayur.”

Tahayur means “ecstatic” in Dari. Ahmad was now talking to the Talib as if he were one of them.

“Have you heard? Everything has fallen in the North. What are we going to do?”

“Don’t worry, we’re still holding our positions,” the Talib said. “Other Afghans won’t harm us in the end—we’re all Afghan.”

“Yes,” Ahmad said with a grin, “but can you imagine what they’re going to do to the Pakistanis and Arabs?”

“Well,” the Talib said, “who cares about them?”

“Listen, I’m not Talib,” Ahmad finally told him. “I’m mujahideen. We know your passwords.”

That didn’t seem to faze the Talib. He just wanted to know when the Northern Alliance was going to launch its offensive.

“Why would we launch an offensive? Then you’ll kill me, and I’ll kill you,” Ahmad pointed out. “We’re just sending those American birds instead, the ones you can’t even touch.”

“You know what God will do with those birds,” the Talib warned before he hung up, but he didn’t sound very convinced. Ahmad laughed.

“For Sheberghan,” he said, passing around some raisins from his pocket. “For Mazar.”

We ate the raisins and sat back in the destroyed control tower and watched the Americans bomb.

~~~

Early last year Massoud was asked by a French journalist whether his fight against the Taliban was futile, given that they controlled 80 percent of the country and enjoyed massive military and economic backing from Pakistan. Massoud smiled. He had been fighting for the freedom of his country for 23 years.

“I’ll tell you what I think: life goes by whether you’re happy or not,” he said. “Any man who looks back on his past and feels he has been of some use need have no regrets.”

Afghan politics are impenetrable even to many Afghans, and Massoud’s role could, in a certain light, be construed as simply a series of military victories followed by political blunders. The worst was his withdrawal from Kabul in 1996, following years of vicious fighting among rival mujahideen factions. As acting minister of defense, he had failed to overcome the ethnic factionalism that fueled the fighting and had failed to fully control his troops. Atrocities were committed in Kabul under his watch, and—though expecting otherwise would have been holding him to an impossibly high standard in a country wracked by two decades of war—some have never forgiven him.

But even Massoud’s critics acknowledged that he was a master of guerrilla war. Nine times the Soviets blasted their way into the Panjshir Valley, 50 miles north of Kabul, and nine times he drove them out. The Taliban army, with its heavy reinforcement of Pakistani volunteers and even regular Pakistani Army troops, outnumbered the Northern Alliance three to one, but they were never able to deliver a decisive blow. The closer Massoud got to defeat, it seemed, the more resourceful and dangerous he became. That was never more true than in 1999, when his forces suffered a devastating rout at Bagram air base and were driven north to the Panjshir Valley. Five hundred thousand civilians walked all night—hundreds drowning in a river during the panic—to make it into the valley ahead of the Taliban tanks.

Massoud acted fast. First he dynamited the walls of the Dalang Sang gorge at the mouth of the valley, effectively locking himself in and the Taliban out. Then he traveled from village to village, mosque to mosque, preaching resistance: “Now it is the time to be ready to die,” he said. “It is better to die fighting for the freedom of your country than to just live a good life, day to day.”

The last time the Taliban had penned Massoud into the Panjshir, in 1996, it took him three months to organize a successful counterattack; this time he turned his forces around almost immediately. He gathered his best fighters and marched all night, coming down out of the mountains at dawn to attack across the Shomali Plain. The Taliban were taken completely by surprise; cut off from their supply lines, they were slaughtered by the hundreds. It was their worst defeat ever at Massoud’s hands, and they never managed to take back the territory they lost.

~~~

When I was in Afghanistan in the fall of 2000, I talked to a Pakistani prisoner of war who had been trained by bin Laden’s network at one of the terrorist camps outside Khost. His name was Khaled, and he described Massoud bitterly as the “last wall” that was keeping al-Qaeda from spreading fundamentalist Islam throughout Afghanistan and the rest of Asia. If they lost in Afghanistan, he said, they would be forced to find another country to use as a base for their global war against the West.

Khaled spoke readily, even proudly, about his plans, as did the 20 or so other prisoners who were with him. They said that they had come from all over the Islamic world to fight Massoud, and that if they were killed it didn’t matter, because others would replace them. It was a religious war, they said, and it was without end.

With men like that in his prisons, it was not surprising that Massoud had taken to warning America about terrorism. Bin Laden had already used Afghanistan as one of the bases to coordinate the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, the 1998 embassy bombings in Africa, and the 2000 attack on the U.S.S. Cole. Clearly, more attacks were on the way. And it was no surprise that Massoud, though a devout Muslim, was one of the targets of an incredibly sophisticated anti-Western conspiracy taking shape in Afghanistan. Over the course of last summer, yet another Taliban offensive ground to a halt on the steppes of northern Afghanistan, and, according to a top commander, Massoud had just bought dozens of refurbished tanks from the Russians to bolster his defenses. The C.I.A. was apparently working with him directly, and Pakistan had even started taking some heat internationally for its support of the Taliban. After five years, alliances had started to shift, arms had started to flow. And one man was at the center of it all.

~~~

On September 9, Massoud was at his rear base, called Khoje Bahauddin, along the Amu Dar’ya River. He was late, as usual, for an important meeting of commanders on the front line, but early in the afternoon he stopped by a government-run guesthouse to greet two journalists who had been waiting for several weeks to see him. They said they worked for an Arab television network and came recommended by the Islamic Observation Center, a nonprofit organization in London. They claimed they wanted to interview him for a documentary on Afghanistan. Without the interview, they said, their entire trip would be wasted.

The men were never searched, partly because Massoud found it disrespectful and partly because they had been vouched for. Later, it would be discovered that their Belgian passports had been forged and that the Islamic Observation Center was linked to al-Qaeda. And someone would remember that the journalists had been strangely protective of their television camera, particularly while jolting down Afghanistan’s dirt roads in a hired Russian jeep. The camera, as it turned out, was packed with explosives, and the men weren’t journalists but al-Qaeda operatives sent by Osama bin Laden.

Massoud apologized for their long wait and settled himself into a chair in one of the guesthouse rooms. Seated around him were Masood Khalili, the Northern Alliance ambassador to India; a translator named Asem Suhail; and an Afghan journalist named Fahim, who was videotaping the interview as well. Massoud’s bodyguards waited outside the door, as usual, out of respect for the journalists. While one of the Arabs busied himself setting up the television camera and tripod, the other gave Massoud a quick rundown of the questions he was going to ask. The first two were vague questions about the war, but the third one caught Massoud’s attention: “What will you do,” the Arab asked, “with Osama if you get him?”

Massoud tilted his head back and laughed. It was the last thing he ever did.

~~~

Word came late on the night of November 11 that the offensive was on. We were back at the governor’s house in Bagram, sitting on the floor eating mutton, when a soldier came in and gave us the news. The Americans would resume bombing at dawn and then the Northern Alliance would move forward in successive waves of 2,500 men. The front line stretched 15 or 20 miles across the Shomali Plain, and at strategic positions alliance troops had been moved forward in preparation. There were more than 12,000 men on this side waiting to attack and perhaps twice that number on the Taliban side waiting to defend. It was possibly the largest troop concentration in Afghanistan since the Russian occupation 20 years earlier.

We woke up the next morning before first light, and the windows were already shaking from bomb blasts. They were close—just a few miles to our south—and seemed to be hitting the highway. An alliance intelligence officer had told us that 4,000 fresh Pakistani recruits were stationed on the two roads that led across the Shomali Plain toward Kabul. The Americans were trying to take them out.

Several hundred Northern Alliance troops had already gathered on the highway by the time we got there. They climbed down out of their trucks and tanks and lined up on the war-pocked hard-top, the first rays of sunlight stabbing their dark faces as they spread their hands open to the sky. First the commander intoned a long prayer, and then one of the soldiers sang a very beautiful song that twisted and dissipated into the still air and left a terrible silence behind it until a roar broke out among the troops, and they clambered back into their trucks.

The convoy lurched forward, and we followed in our pickup, completely engulfed in a cloud of yellow dust that eliminated any understanding of where we were or where we were going. All across the valley, Northern Alliance troops were moving forward to their frontline positions. After a half-mile the trucks stopped, and we jumped down with the soldiers behind a mud bunker at a position called Du-Saraka as the tanks continued forward. The Americans were still bombing, and a half-dozen or so journalists were standing around, inattentive and expectant, when the first shell came in and put us all in the dirt. It was an 82-mm. mortar, and another followed a few minutes later. Finally a third hit right where all the journalists had been clustered moments before, scattering us like quail.

Shaken and dirt-streaked, we regrouped back at the highway. The Northern Alliance had gotten the Taliban positions in their range, and we could hear their rockets rip through the air as they crossed over our heads. Great gouts of smoke bloomed silently on a distant hilltop, followed by flat thuds as the concussions reached us 10 seconds later. It was mid-morning by now, and beyond Du-Saraka an enraged smattering of small-arms fire started, intensifying and subsiding and intensifying again before shifting off to the south. The alliance tanks were moving forward through no-man’s-land, firing as they went, and the soldiers were following in their tracks to avoid the land mines. The Taliban lines were not holding. The alliance was breaking through, and the battle was rolling as they moved forward.

~~~

Around noon there was a lull in the fighting while Northern Alliance troops advanced to occupy positions abandoned by the Taliban. We moved forward as well, arriving at a mud fortress where troops had gathered for the next wave of attacks. Some wore ill-fitting combat fatigues bought from Iran, but most were local fighters in old wool jackets, baggy shalwar kameez, knit wool caps, and loafers or old sneakers broken down at the heel. All were strapped up with ammo belts and combat pouches and great loops of .30-caliber ammunition for the terrible, belt-fed PKAs they carried so casually over their shoulders.

The fighters squatted in the dust, feeding rounds into ammo clips and nibbling on pistachios. Some begged water off us because they hadn’t drunk all day, and others begged cigarettes or food. They were young and giggled like schoolgirls when we talked to them, but when a nearby rocket launcher misfired they turned into men again and rushed over to load the gunner’s limp and bleeding body into our pickup truck. Our driver took the man rearward to a field hospital, and we sat in the dust and waited like everyone else for the order to attack.

Rumor had it that the attack would come at two. At one o’clock, word went through the compound that three journalists had been shot off an armored personnel carrier (A.P.C.) up North during a Taliban ambush near Taloqan the night before. At 1:30, an Associated Press journalist came wobbling back into our camp with a bullet hole in the middle of his back, the bullet having been stopped by the steel plate of his flak jacket. Two o’clock came and went with just a ripple of agitation passing through the troops. We watched a Taliban missile float gracefully up into the air and then fall back hopelessly short of the American jet it had been trying to hit.

The jet rose and disappeared into the sunlight and then glinted back into existence as it dove. It had long since pulled out and banked for home when we heard the howl of four American bombs rushing downward toward us. We ducked—an utterly pointless act—and then a wall of smoke rose a half-mile away along the Taliban lines, followed almost immediately by four separate concussions that moved through us like little earthquakes.

The orders came in just minutes later; a commander held his radio up so that his troops could hear. One soldier started praying. This was it. Kabul lay just 20 miles to the south; this was the culmination of five years of war.

~~~

Massoud’s funeral took place seven days after his death. His coffin was covered in flowers and transported atop an A.P.C. that moved slowly, like a ship through a sea of screaming people. Black-white-and-green Afghan flags waved in the slack wind, and children watched mutely from the side of the road, pouring handfuls of dirt over their heads in grief. The procession stretched for miles along the sparkling Panjshir River and wound its way up a desolate hilltop outside the town of Basarak, coming to a stop in front of a huge hole in the ground.

“We have lost Massoud, but there are a thousand other Massouds who will replace him!” Yunus Qanooni, the minister of the interior, shouted into a bullhorn.

“The world did not hear the suffering of the Afghan people, but now they have started to because the same thing has happened to them,” proclaimed Burhanuddin Rabbani, the aging president of the Northern Alliance.

Indeed. Two days after Massoud was assassinated, over 3,000 people died in the attack on the World Trade Center in New York City, and over 200 more died at the Pentagon and at the crash site in Pennsylvania. It was the worst act of terrorism ever in America, eclipsing Timothy McVeigh’s 1995 attack on the Alfred P. Murrah building in Oklahoma City; it was perhaps the only time in history that American civilians have felt directly targeted by an act of war.

While America reeled in shock, events in Afghanistan were moving fast. Within hours of the killing of Massoud, the Taliban launched a major offensive that was clearly meant to capitalize on the confusion and panic caused by the assassination. In an attempt to keep their front lines from collapsing, the Northern Alliance denied all rumors that Massoud was dead, until September 14, when they issued a statement that he had been killed in a suicide bombing by suspected al-Qaeda operatives. Masood Khalili had survived, but lost one of his eyes and suffered shrapnel wounds to his legs. Fahim survived with just severe flash burns across the arms and neck. Asem Suhail was killed. One of the attackers died immediately; all they found of him were his legs. The other, miraculously, survived the blast and tried to flee on foot. He was gunned down by one of Massoud’s bodyguards almost immediately.

The two assassins had entered Afghanistan through Pakistan and walked across the front lines somewhere north of Kabul. Their plan was to kill Massoud in late August, which would have given the Taliban several weeks to wipe out the Northern Alliance before al-Qaeda’s attacks in the United States. There’s no question they could have done it, and had that happened, the United States would have found itself with no allies on the ground to do its fighting for it, no bases inside Afghanistan from which to launch search-and-destroy missions. It would have been right back where the Russians were in 1980—and everyone knows how that turned out.

Fortunately, Massoud’s desperately busy schedule kept him out of reach—and alive—for nearly a month. By the time his assassins finally got to him, the Taliban had run out of time; September 11 was only two days away. While the State Department indulged Pakistan’s diplomatic maneuvers in the wake of the terrorist attacks, the Pentagon abandoned all such concerns and went ahead planning a joint military operation with the Northern Alliance.

Shortly before the offensive began, the State Department, at the behest of President Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan, demanded that the Northern Alliance refrain from entering Kabul. As those words were being spoken, U.S. warplanes were busy bombing a path for them through the Taliban front lines. They were two completely contradictory messages, but it was clear which one the Northern Alliance would listen to.

~~~

The tanks went through the front lines first, and we were behind the third one in dust so thick it was as if we were moving along the floor of some sickly yellow sea. We jolted between low mud walls, past destroyed houses and the dark shapes of soldiers who loomed briefly and then slid back into the murk. There was shooting up ahead, and rockets were still ripping over our heads, but the Taliban lines had completely collapsed in the first spasms of fighting. The only thing that concerned us—and it didn’t seem to bother the alliance troops much—was the danger of attacking too fast and getting cut off. The Taliban could easily repeat Massoud’s tactics and just retreat into the hills and strike back at night.

All across the valley, alliance soldiers and armor were moving forward toward the two roads that led to Kabul. The tanks in front of us clanked out onto the hard-top, which was pitted by years of fighting and littered with shrapnel and spent bullets, and turned south. It was a headlong advance, and we were caught up in it like flotsam. Flatbeds full of regular-army troops and A.P.C.’s with four-barrel anti-aircraft guns and old Russian tanks and Datsun pickups packed with mujahideen all hurtled southward through no-man’s-land and then past the first Taliban bunkers. We were in liberated Afghanistan.

There was no resistance at all. Groups of alliance soldiers that had battled their way through the lines were moving across the flatlands at a run and spilling out onto the highway in groups of 50, 100, 200, embracing one another, shooting their weapons into the air, throwing their arms up toward the sky. Tanks bucked to a stop, and commanders leaned down off their turrets to kiss men they recognized. A wounded man sat by himself on the side of the road, ignored in the jubilation. It was a complete rout, and the alliance wasn’t going to stop until it was in Kabul.

The convoy roared southward, stopping only to absorb more troops coming in off the plain. Fires were burning on the hillsides, and Katyusha rockets hissed overhead, leaving beautiful red streaks across the sky. We rocked past blown-up cars, their contents sprayed across the hard-top, past four craters—so enormous they could have been made only by American bombs—and destroyed Russian tanks left over from the last war, still askew on the road after more than a decade.

We took some incoming fire around the destroyed town of Qara-Bagh, and the convoy accordioned to a stop, fighters spilling out of their trucks to shoot back into the darkness. It was night now, and the headlights of the tanks projected the silhouettes of men onto the dust-choked air like an old black-and-white movie. Three Taliban were dragged out of a bunker, dirty and terrified, and pushed along through the crowd toward the side of the road. One was an old man, a Turk wounded in the chest, who claimed he was a cook. A young alliance soldier cocked his gun and started to haul him off the road but was stopped by Reza, the photographer I was working with. Reza told the soldier in Dari that he had known Massoud during the 80s, when they were fighting the Russians, and that Massoud had absolutely forbidden the mistreatment of prisoners.

“I have all your photographs,” Reza warned. “Respect the memory of Massoud, or I will report you all.”

The Turk was put in a car with a dead alliance soldier and driven north. There was heavy fighting up ahead, and we decided it was too dangerous to continue. The journalists in Taloqan had died in a night ambush, and we wanted to be sure that didn’t happen to us. Soldiers started to build twig fires along the side of the road to boil water for tea, the orange tips of their cigarettes waving in the dark. Five years of terrorism and repression had just been broken along this destroyed stretch of road.

~~~

Five dead Taliban waited for us in the middle of the highway the next morning, probably dragged out of their car and shot by alliance soldiers just hours earlier. One of them—apparently the commander—was middle-aged and fat, and lay on his back with his head thrown back. The others looked to be in their 20s and lay around him in strange contortions. Their eyes were open and they looked straight up at the sky.

There were plenty of stories of reprisal killings, but given the hatreds that had developed over two decades of war, the crimes were minimal—hundreds of dead, maybe, but not thousands. For the most part, the local Taliban were spared, and the foreigners either died fighting or were killed as they surrendered. There were also stories—plenty of them—of alliance soldiers intervening to save Taliban who were being lynched by mobs in Kabul. Those incidents, however, tended not to be as eagerly reported by the press.

We arrived outside Kabul early the next morning. Dozens of alliance tanks and several thousand fighters had stopped on the last hilltop before town, on the orders of their officers, while special units went forward to secure the city. The residents were so terrified of a power vacuum that they sent a delegation of elders up the road to beg their liberators to enter Kabul. The alliance was too worried about international criticism to respond immediately, but by noon alliance tanks were rolling through the streets. For all the U.S. State Department’s hand-wringing about the Northern Alliance, it was clear that the people of Kabul wanted them in the city as soon as possible.

We left our truck where the tanks had blocked the road, and walked down off the hill, Kabul stretching out before us. Thousands of city residents had walked up the highway to greet the Northern Alliance, and we dodged through them to shouts of “America!” and “Massoud!” One kid pedaled past on a bicycle, playing a harmonica. A man showed off a curved dagger he’d taken off an Arab. The Taliban military headquarters on the outskirts had been pancaked by American bombs, and a dead Arab lay in front of it. At a street market, people were dancing in front of an old stereo that was blasting Indian rock through blown-out speakers. They were a people who had been let out of jail, and they wandered the streets with the same stunned disbelief.

And the dead: five Arabs scattered across an intersection after their truck was hit by an American rocket, eight more in a city park after a shoot-out with alliance soldiers. (Apparently the Arabs had awoken in their bunker that morning, unaware that anything was wrong, and had wandered out into the city to find their army gone.) Once the Taliban had started to unravel, they went fast. Their strongest positions were around Mazar, where al-Qaeda’s 55th Brigade was stationed, and after that city fell, people knew it was only a matter of time. Many of the captured frontline fighters had been in Afghanistan only a week or two, which led to suspicions that they had been placed there to slow the alliance troops while more senior Taliban made their escape.

In Kabul, the Taliban had been in full flight by the time dark had fallen the night before. For days people had been hiding their cars, worried that desperate Taliban soldiers would steal them in order to escape, and around six o’clock that night they noticed a lot of Taliban in the streets, loading their belongings into pickup trucks. The Taliban drove out of the city in convoys headed south. Some stopped to clean out the money changers’ market; others stopped to loot the national bank. Around midnight, the cook at the infamous Pul-i-Charkhi prison knocked the locks off the main gate and freed the inmates. Thousands of them, including captured alliance fighters, poured out of their cells and scattered in every direction across the dark plain, ignorant of why they’d been liberated and probably not caring.

~~~

The city changed by the day, practically by the hour. Under the Taliban it had been illegal to reproduce the human face or to do anything that would distract from Islam. Now the television station was broadcasting for the first time in five years. People started to take paintings and photographs out of the closets and to dig up chess sets from their backyards. We stayed about a week and then drove north across the old front line and then past Bagram and Jabal and into the Panjshir Valley. It was going to take a couple of days to get a helicopter out, and one afternoon Reza and I climbed up to a hilltop grave that overlooked the valley. Two middle-aged men were there, and we asked them who lay buried.

“Abdi Mohammed,” one man said. “He died attacking a Russian tank that was dug in right where you’re standing. He was 23 years old.”

Mohammed’s house was nearby. He had joined the mujahideen when the Russians took over his village, and died a few hundred yards away from the house he was born in, trying to drive them out.

A lot of things could happen now, I thought. Kabul was free, and the Taliban had been toppled, but the point of all this was to end terrorism, and that may or may not happen. There are many good reasons for doing something, though, and some don’t become clear immediately. Some take decades. A short distance from Abdi Mohammed’s grave was a stone bench with a sapling near it. The sapling was about five feet tall, and I asked the man why it was there.

“Well, this is a good place to sit and think,” the man said. “But there was no shade here. So I planted a tree.”

“When do you think it’s going to be big enough to sit under?”

“Probably not for 50 years,” he said. He must have seen me frown. “It’s not for me, obviously,” he added. “It’s for the others.”