What Is Beneath Your Pakol?
Author: Soraya Baha, writer, especially for Sangar
What I Learned from Commander Massoud on the Panjshir Front
Struggle is an art, and its highest expression is for a courageous commander to be present on the front line — a commander who values the lives of his soldiers as highly as his own honor, dignity, and ideals.
What I learned from Commander Ahmad Shah Massoud on the Panjshir front was that courage alone is not enough in an armed struggle. Courage must be combined with military knowledge, the ability to manage human resources, discipline, risk assessment, and a precise understanding of the enemy’s strengths and vulnerabilities.
In Massoud’s operational approach, preserving the lives of his fighters was one of the fundamental principles. When planning and carrying out attacks on Soviet positions and bases, the priority was to minimize casualties among his own forces, followed by the achievement of the military objective. The success of an operation was not measured solely by the capture of a position. Liberating territory, taking enemy personnel prisoner, capturing weapons and military equipment — including Kalashnikov rifles, DShK heavy machine guns, tanks, and ammunition — and, more broadly, achieving operational superiority were also among the expected outcomes.
From this perspective, manpower was a military asset for Massoud, not an expendable resource. A soldier should not be sacrificed merely to fill the battlefield. Responsible command means maintaining a balance between the military objective, the human cost, and the operational outcome. Are soldiers sacrificial sheep to be sent onto the battlefield without calculation and without achieving any result?
Before entering the battlefield, a wise leader, a fighter, a guerrilla, and a soldier must understand and master both the art and the ethics of struggle. Fighting an enemy depends not only on weapons and physical strength; it also requires strong leadership, effective organization, accurate intelligence, fighting spirit, discipline, and sound decision-making.
Therefore, in a complex military structure, individual leadership, no matter how strong, is not sufficient on its own. The existence of a collective decision-making body — such as a military council or central committee composed of wise, experienced, competent, and committed individuals — can enhance the decision-making and management capacity of a movement or military force.
Commander Massoud had an extensive and cohesive organizational structure, and he organized, directed, and controlled the various fronts in such a way that, to many observers, its operations resembled a complex and integrated system — one in which information was gathered at different levels, analyzed, and transformed into operational decisions.
Massoud cannot be defined merely as a field commander. In the particular historical circumstances of Afghanistan, he was a political-military strategist capable of integrating warfare, politics, organization, and diplomacy. Even some Soviet military officers took particular note of his military capabilities.
General Boris Gromov, commander of Soviet forces in Afghanistan, describes 1985 in his memoirs as one of the most intense periods of the war. It was during this period, amid fierce and prolonged fighting against forces under the command of Ahmad Shah Massoud, that it became increasingly clear to the Soviet leadership that the Afghan problem could not be resolved by military means alone and that a political solution had to be sought.
This brings us to an important question:
How, over the course of centuries and across countless generations, does a figure like Ahmad Shah Massoud emerge? Are such genius and talent purely an individual phenomenon, or can their roots be found in the social environment, culture, historical experience, education, political circumstances, and innate abilities?
Commander Massoud was recognizable by the pakol on his head and the Palestinian scarf around his neck; however, Massoud should not be defined by his outward appearance. The pakol, the Palestinian scarf, the military uniform, and even a weapon — none of these alone can turn a person into a commander.
What distinguished Massoud from others was the thinking behind that outward appearance — a mind capable of thinking, analyzing, making decisions, and taking responsibility for them.
Not everyone who puts on a pakol and wraps a Palestinian scarf around his neck becomes Massoud — just as wearing a military uniform does not, by itself, make someone a professional soldier.
Massoud should be sought in knowledge, experience, discipline, courage, analytical ability, organizational skills, decision-making, and leadership — not in his outward appearance.
Beneath Massoud’s headgear was the “gray matter” we call the brain. But the real question is:
What is beneath your headgear?
