Johan F. is a former French officer who fought alongside Commander Massoud between 1999 and 2001. He lived for many years in Afghanistan.
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EXCLUSIVE - With the new masters of Kabul, our report at the heart of the Taliban power
Le Figaro. - What were you doing in Panchir twenty years ago, and how did you get there?
Johan F. -
In 1999, I gave up a military career in France, which seemed disappointing to me, and I went to seek the war adventure in Afghanistan.
I was 28 years old, in fatigues for 8 years and packed with training, but I had not experienced any outside operations.
When in August I arrived in the Panchir and was able to talk to Commander Massoud, I made myself available.
He then asked me to do training for his commandos.
It started like this!
I spent several stays, until his death, and in these 14 cumulative months, I educated a lot, but I also learned a lot, and I was finally able to live the ordeal that I had come to seek for myself: to face an enemy, and to resist him.
Johan F. in Afghanistan.
DR
What made you decide to choose Afghanistan?
The seeds of Afghanistan were sown in my teenage years through historical readings on Central Asia, adventure stories and television reports.
Above all, there was a cause: 1998 was the year of the Al-Qaida attacks in Africa, Osama bin Laden became the elusive terrible enemy, and the journalist Christophe de Ponfilly reminded us in a very human documentary (
Massoud l 'Afghan
NDLR) the noble fight of an Afghan commander who, alone, in the mountain, resisted.
Read alsoAfghanistan: why the Panchir is the historic bastion of armed resistance to the Taliban
The following summer, I became civilian, and therefore free, at the very moment of launching an offensive.
I flew away accompanying a war photographer who had been introduced to me.
Visa in Paris, plane in Frankfurt, hotel in Dushanbe, a small
pool
of journalists gathered, then a helicopter and we arrived in the Panchir.
What was your role with Massoud? Did you have a direct relationship with him?
My first trainings had some success.
Times were hard: the war, the refugees, the humanitarian crisis in the valley.
No meat to eat, no wood to heat.
We appreciated my energy in this academy that was being formed.
Massoud sometimes passed and a relationship of trust was established.
I learned the language, I rubbed shoulders with his entourage - his brother-in-law, in particular, was in charge of welcoming foreigners.
I had great freedom, I could get in a helicopter, travel.
Leave, come back.
I dare to take advantage of a certain friendship.
We regularly had discussions on political and military matters.
At the time, Clinton gave way to Bush, Yeltsin to Putin.
He was preparing for a major operation and wondering, for example, about the best use of armored vehicles.
What happened on September 9, 2001? What was the background?
The Taliban were running out of steam.
Economic and geopolitical aspects, as well as efforts on drugs, clashed with pugnacious women's rights activists.
The hard line won out in the end.
The Buddhas of Bâmiyân, was that a subject?
They were destroyed!
The Taliban were running out of steam.
The hard line won out in the end.
Johan F.
Massoud?
Al-Qaida made it a personal matter and offered to take care of it… Because images had circulated.
In June 2000, European parliamentarians came to question Massoud.
The journalists moved freely around him, passed in his home, and in doing so, revealed an ease of access from which his assassins were able to draw inspiration.
The elected officials asked him: "
If you were in power in Kabul, what would you do with Mr. Bin Laden?"
".
On September 9, 2001, before triggering the explosion, the two terrorists, who passed themselves off as journalists, asked him, in macabre irony, the same question ...
What remains of Commander Massoud, 20 years later, as the Taliban regain power?
A mausoleum, guarded by the Taliban.
A monument that he would never have accepted but emblematic of the exploitation, for vile purposes, made of his name, his convictions and his reputation.
His epic is today in memory competition with that of his last adversaries.
25 years of fighting, hardship, suffering with here a victory against the Soviet Union and there another against America.
The mausoleum of Commander Massoud.
SHAH MARAI / AFP
Are the Taliban of yesterday the same as today?
They have changed.
At first age, they had Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates as
sponsors
.
Best friends today are Qatar and Turkey.
In other words, the Muslim Brotherhood.
The Koran and the Sharia have not changed, but the Brothers are those who best master the dialectic between Islam and modernity.
Alive, would Commander Massoud still face them today?
While he was alive, there would never have been 20 years of “
strategic partnership
” with the United States! In 1996, Massoud left Kabul to the Taliban and sought a political solution. Today the Taliban are offering peace and amnesty, but at the time they did not want to negotiate. In his last year, Massoud told me that this option was unfortunately closed and that we now had to organize things differently. The military solution has come true. Without him unfortunately, because he had just been killed. And, quite easily for the foreign forces, because he had everything ready.
Today, of course he would be for peace!
He would welcome the development of the camp opposite.
In the 1970s, he himself had made his first ideological classes with the Muslim Brotherhood.
Let us note, therefore, to be pleased, that, in recent years, young Pakistan has drawn closer to old Turkey and the mullahs of Kandahar from the ideas that Massoud already had 50 years ago!
Commander Massoud haranguing his fighters.
AFP
How to judge the departure of the Americans, the rapid fall of the country in the hands of the Taliban, and the resistance of Ahmad Massoud, the son of the Commander?
Joe Biden was right… in 2009 when he doubted the machinery of "counterinsurgency".
At the time, he gave in to the military and we can say that he is now recovering his courage.
No one wanted to build democratic opposition to foreign occupation; on the contrary, everyone had to be lined up behind the Americans.
Result: the Taliban became the only opposition, and the inevitable alternation was that of their return to power.
Read also Ahmad Massoud: in the name of the father
That said, the game is not yet over ... The new geopolitical situation has fierce opponents. A current in India might not want Pakistan strengthened. A current in America might like to see the Democratic administration fail. A current in Israel could be worried about a scattered arsenal ... In this context Ahmad Massoud and Amrullah Saleh speak of "
resistance
" and aggregate support, from the noblest to the most interested ...
What is certain is that if the Taliban announce that the war is over, then there is no more Jihad!
There are no more Mujahedin and all Afghans must submit to the ban on war between Muslims.
Massoud father proposed that we agree on this.
After 43 years of civil war, let's hope that the Afghans do not kill each other soon!
SEE ALSO -
Afghanistan: according to Commander Massoud's brother, the Taliban did not take all of Panchir