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JANGALAK, Afghanistan — Each September, thousands of people flock to this tiny village along the rushing waters of the Panjshir River like pilgrims to a holy shrine, coming to commemorate the death of Ahmed Shah Massoud, the most celebrated hero of the Afghan resistance.
Jangalak, the birthplace of Mr.Massoud, welcomes pilgrims.
Aging men with war-gnarled limbs march with grandsons in tow up a winding path lined with placards bearing Mr. Massoud’s portrait: a time-softened image with the beatific quality of a shepherd cradling a lamb. They recite prayers at his black-marble tomb and circle back down in a flowing parade of adoration.
Younger men — too young to have fought alongside him but who grew up on tales of his tactical genius against the Russians and later the Taliban government — spill out of pickup trucks waving black flags and whooping as if they had won all those battles themselves.
“He was a hero, 100 percent,” said Mohammad Aslam, 68, a former mujahedeen fighter, who was among an estimated 50,000 devotees who trekked here for Saturday’s event, part of a series of festivities across parts of the country for the 10th anniversary of the death of the man they knew as the Lion of Panjshir.
As Americans observe the day 10 years ago when terrorists in hijacked planes attacked New York and the Pentagon, the people of northern Afghanistan remember what for them was a greater tragedy two days earlier on Sept. 9, 2001. It was then that two agents of Al Qaeda posing as journalists detonated a bomb hidden in a television camera during an interview with Mr. Massoud, killing him instantly.
For his closest aides, who first tried to keep his death secret, fearing the truth would sink the besieged Northern Alliance for good, the collapse of the World Trade Center towers was a sign of hope. They instinctively saw a nexus in the two acts — though one has never been proved — and knew that the Americans would soon be on their way.
“I sort of woke up out of this shock I had been in since Sept. 9,” Abdullah Abdullah, the Northern Alliance’s former foreign minister, recalled about hearing the news of the attacks in New York. “It automatically came to my mind that out of this tragedy, there might be an opening.”
A decade later, millions more children, including girls, go to school; access to health care has expanded; roads in many places, including leading up to this valley, are better. But amid the signs of progress there are also growing concerns as foreign forces set the stage for withdrawal. The Taliban continue to assert themselves with roadside bombs and suicide attacks — the latest on Saturday, at a NATO outpost in Wardak Province, killed at least two civilians. Confidence in President Hamid Karzai’s corruption-addled government is faltering on multiple fronts.
Many of Mr. Massoud’s former allies in the north, some of whom have profited mightily in the land grabs and cash giveaways that followed the American invasion, have signaled resistance to Mr. Karzai’s efforts to negotiate a peace settlement with the Taliban.
“Dig the trenches, bring out the ammunition and let’s get ready for the next civil war,” one senior Western diplomat said recently, only half in jest.
In the turmoil, Mr. Massoud’s legend has only grown, fostering imaginings of what could have been, if only he had lived.
Mr. Aslam, the former fighter, said, “If he were still alive, this would be a strong country now.”
Today, portraits of Mr. Massoud are not limited to this village, his birthplace. They adorn virtually every government office in Kabul, the capital.
They stare out from the windows of taxis and buses on dusty city streets. His otherworldly eyes watch over his disciples from billboards plastered across northern towns and hamlets. Here in Jangalak, a foundation named in his honor has built a white-marble dome around his tomb, and the construction of a library, study center and museum is under way, a fitting tribute to a warrior who spoke French, read poetry and was said to have a library with 3,000 books.
But like so much else in Afghanistan, memories of Mr. Massoud are tempered by ethnic and geographical divisions. He was declared a national hero in 2002, and Sept. 9 is a national holiday. But his posters, so present in the north, are nowhere to be found in the south.
An ethnic Tajik, Mr. Massoud is remembered by many in the Pashtun-dominated south for his days after the Soviet retreat, when he and the Tajik-centric government failed to unify the tempestuous mujahedeen factions that fractured before they could even celebrate their victory over the Communist-backed government.
With Mr. Massoud as defense minister and Burhanuddin Rabbani as president, Kabul became the center of a civil war, as formerly united rebel commanders, each with his own militia, shelled one another and battled it out on the streets. In 1993 alone, an estimated 10,000 civilians died, compared with 2,777 last year, the most since American troops arrived in 2001.
The chaos gave rise to the Taliban in the south, who by September 1996 had marched into Kabul, forcing Mr. Massoud and his forces to flee back to the Panjshir Valley, the same isolated redoubt high in the Hindu Kush mountains where he had held off the Russians time and again.
“We know that Massoud was a great man,” said Hajji Ahmad Khan Muslim, a political analyst and tribal elder in the southern city of Kandahar. “But we have numbers of national heroes in the south. It’s not fair that only one person should emerge as a hero.”
Ahmad Umaid, a Kandahar shopkeeper, said he did not consider Mr. Massoud a hero.
“He was a big part of the civil war,” Mr. Umaid said. “That was him and those other warlords firing rockets into Kabul, causing so many civilian deaths. That was his men bringing prejudices among other ethnic groups.”
Mr. Umaid is hardly alone in the south in his views.
Those who were close to Mr. Massoud say that had he lived, he would have fought for more integrity and unity in the government, perhaps mindful of his own failings during the civil war.
“He always said,” Mr. Abdullah recalled, “ ‘Those were my saddest days.’ ”
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