Ahmad Shah Massoud was Afghanistan’s best hope

Ahmed Shah Massoud was described as ‘the Afghan who won the Cold War’. While famous in France (he was educated at the Kabul lycée, and the French saw him as the ultimate maquisard who drove a super-power out of his country), he is not a familiar figure in Britain. This book, a rich and detailed account of the travails and tragedy of Afghanistan between 1976 and Massoud’s murder in 2001, will correct that.

Sandy Gall’s knowledge of the jihad is encyclopaedic. He was the first well-known journalist to make the dangerous journey into occupied Afghanistan and bring the human cost of this terrible war to our TV screens. To produce such a book at the age of 93 deserves admiration.

Many warlords are also writers: Babur, T.E. Lawrence, Churchill and, as we now know, Massoud, who kept a diary throughout the jihad. In a tremendous scoop, Gall obtained access to some of these hand-written exercise books. They are an extraordinary document, being a detailed account of the war and also self-revealing. Massoud admitted: ‘My weakness in oratory has caused me to lose great opportunities — but I am not bad at writing.’ His remarkable personality is obvious — generous, forgiving and always careful to attribute the key Afghan virtue of honour even to his opponents. He commanded huge loyalty from everyone who met him.

A strength of Gall’s book is its detailed discussion of Pakistan’s malign interference in Afghanistan, where the Taliban are their proxy force. Massoud wrote: ‘It is the aim of Pakistan to see the Afghan state and its institutions collapse totally.’ What has happened there from the 1980s onwards has been dictated by the Pakistani secret service, the ISI. They grandiloquently call it ‘strategic depth’, which I suspect means removing the threat of a two-front war in case of hostilities with India.