Next to the crystal candy dish in Masood Khalili’s parlor is a framed 1984 photograph of two men in combat fatigues, leaning against a rock in Afghanistan, their rifles resting behind them.
Khalili is on the left. The man on the right, with the sharp face and brooding eyes, is the legendary Afghan resistance commander Ahmed Shah Massood.
On Sept. 9, the two men were together again, this time in Massood’s Panjshir Valley headquarters–the commander granting an interview to two men claiming to be journalists, the longtime political aide at his side.
And though there are no pictures of that meeting, Khalili said in an interview last week that he relives the moment every night: the cameraman adjusting his equipment with a “poisonous smile,” the burst of blue fire rushing toward him.
Then comes a second scene, equally searing: “I open my eyes. I am lying in a helicopter. My commander’s face is 10 centimeters from me, full of blood but still handsome. . . . Every single night I see that face.”
The suicide bombing fatally wounded Massood. Khalili survived but is blind in one eye and unable to walk.
Since Massood’s death, Afghanistan’s political fortunes have turned upside down. The ruling Taliban regime is the target of a U.S.-led bombing campaign and the Northern Alliance–a ragtag militia built around Massood’s charismatic personality–is the de facto ground ally of an international alliance.
Khalili, Afghanistan’s ambassador to India, adamantly blamed Osama bin Laden, who is sheltered by the Taliban, for orchestrating Massood’s assassination.
