The US government has a long history of avoiding all-out war commitments by simply funding and supplying groups on the relative cheap to do the fighting for them. But there’s no doubt it will be tempting for the war hawks whose wounded pride demands some kind of retribution against the Taliban. How seriously Massoud’s entreaties will be taken in Washington is an open question at this point. But we need help,” a pitch to Western powers to facilitate a new anti-Taliban insurgency in the country, one in the spirit of the “National United Front” - better known as the Northern Alliance that fought and eventually helped overthrow the Taliban in 2001 by partnering with the invading United States.Ĭasting the northern Panjshir province that he and other potential resistance leaders are holed up in as “the last bastion of Afghan freedom,” Massoud is asking for “more weapons, more ammunition, and more supplies” from the international coalition that had waged war in the country for twenty years. In a Washington Post op-ed last week, Ahmad Massoud, son of the late Afghan warlord Ahmad Shah Massoud, writes, “The mujahideen resistance to the Taliban begins now.

The dust has barely settled on the close of the US war in Afghanistan, and already another one is brewing.