WI: Ahmad Shah Massoud lives and becomes leader of Afghanistan

What if Ahmad Shah Massoud was not assassinated and became leader of post-Taliban Afghanistan in place of Hamid Karzai?
 
What if Ahmad Shah Massoud was not assassinated and became leader of post-Taliban Afghanistan in place of Hamid Karzai?

It would be a bad idea for the Americans to install him as leader as they did with Karzai, because Massoud was Tajik and so the Taliban could paint themselves as a Pashtun nationalist resistance. Of course, this is the Bush administration we're talking about, so they could easily put an incompetent like Paul Bremer in Kabul who would do just that.

A Massoud presidency would likely be more palatable to the West and feature less overt corruption and more efforts to promote women's rights. He could also easily rally the non-Pashtun half of Afghan society behind him through his charismatic leadership. However, his closeness to India and overt animosity towards the Pakistanis would cause problems and bring him and his American backers into confrontation with Musharraf.

Instead of Pakistan as a two-faced ally of the USA it would swiftly become a one-faced enemy. Rather than just helping conceal Taliban and al-Qaeda leaders, the Pakistani ISI might resume their funding of Mullah Omar's troops.

So there you have it: a strong leadership in Kabul that fully controls the north of the country and could get additional support and funding from India, fighting a better-equipped Taliban in what could soon degenerate into an ethnic war. Probably a higher-intensity conflict all around.
 
It would be a bad idea for the Americans to install him as leader as they did with Karzai, because Massoud was Tajik and so the Taliban could paint themselves as a Pashtun nationalist resistance. Of course, this is the Bush administration we're talking about, so they could easily put an incompetent like Paul Bremer in Kabul who would do just that.

This is the crux of it. The Northern Alliance was a significantly Tajik and Uzbek led organization, and Massoud as President would only enforce this. Now, he was probably the best that the Northern Alliance really had to offer, but it wasn't like he an infallible figure.

I do doubt how efficiently the Taliban could paint itself as Pashto nationalist. There's no way that Massoud could muck up the situation any worse than Karzai domestically (the military ratios...those are another matter), and I think that, at the better end of the spectrum, Massoud might be better at re-integrating the warlords into Afghan society.

Now, here's the real challenge. A number of sources on Massoud (IIRC) stated that, even if he was a leader, he didn't want to stay one (he was originally an engineer, and wanted to return to that field). So the question is, if he steps down/dies, who succeeds him?
 
It would be a bad idea for the Americans to install him as leader as they did with Karzai, because Massoud was Tajik and so the Taliban could paint themselves as a Pashtun nationalist resistance. Of course, this is the Bush administration we're talking about, so they could easily put an incompetent like Paul Bremer in Kabul who would do just that.

A Massoud presidency would likely be more palatable to the West and feature less overt corruption and more efforts to promote women's rights. He could also easily rally the non-Pashtun half of Afghan society behind him through his charismatic leadership. However, his closeness to India and overt animosity towards the Pakistanis would cause problems and bring him and his American backers into confrontation with Musharraf.

Instead of Pakistan as a two-faced ally of the USA it would swiftly become a one-faced enemy. Rather than just helping conceal Taliban and al-Qaeda leaders, the Pakistani ISI might resume their funding of Mullah Omar's troops.

So there you have it: a strong leadership in Kabul that fully controls the north of the country and could get additional support and funding from India, fighting a better-equipped Taliban in what could soon degenerate into an ethnic war. Probably a higher-intensity conflict all around.

IMHO, the best outcome would have been restoring Zahir Shah to the throne as a constitutional monarch and having Massoud or (if as OTL he was killed) another non-Pashtun Northern Alliance leader as Prime Minister.
 
IMHO, the best outcome would have been restoring Zahir Shah to the throne as a constitutional monarch and having Massoud or (if as OTL he was killed) another non-Pashtun Northern Alliance leader as Prime Minister.

This is not a bad idea, but America had already alienated the royalists during the 1980s by allowing the ISI to divert most of the funding away from them and towards Islamists like Hekmatyar - whose troops occasionally sabotaged and killed the royalists' in order to obtain control of the mujahedin movement. The arguments for doing this seemed sound at the time, because the royalists were relatively ineffective fighters compared to the Islamists (one CIA man in Islamabad referred to Zahir Shah as a "liberal arts jackoff").

Still, a royal restoration could be worth a try.

Another possible PoD would be having Abdul Haq survive instead of Massoud. Haq was principled and had fought against both the Soviets and the Taliban - and he was Pashtun, which avoids Massoud's problem. Unfortunately the Americans hated him too (he'd been too vocal about the problems with the CIA's fund distribution, IIRC) and he opposed a US invasion, so I can't see him and the Bush administration coming to terms well enough to get himself appointed leader. Maybe he could win a fair election.
 
IMHO, the best outcome would have been restoring Zahir Shah to the throne as a constitutional monarch and having Massoud or (if as OTL he was killed) another non-Pashtun Northern Alliance leader as Prime Minister.
Hear, hear!
The monarchy was the only reason why there was an Afghanistan that included such ethnically diverse areas rather than just Pashtun ones in the first place, and thus the only credible (or at least 'semi-credible') symbol of national unity other than "We're all fighting against a common enemy"...
 
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