The dead man's face is everywhere, looking down from walls, staring through windshields, decorating storefronts. Ahmed Shah Massoud is Kabul's inescapable poster boy, his symbolic presence eclipsed only by his corporeal absence.
The placards -- thousands of them -- are displayed here with as much regret as respect, for Massoud, the Northern Alliance's legendary guerrilla commander, was assassinated on Sept. 9. In a nation as spare of heroes as it is of food, he is one of history's more ironic celebrities, a man who died just a few moments before his time had come.
Few feel the loss more than the eye surgeon who now occupies the main office in Afghanistan's Foreign Ministry. Abdullah Abdullah was one of Massoud's best friends. On Saturday, in a two-and-a-half-hour interview, the alliance's foreign minister repeatedly and tearfully lamented the loss of someone who might have saved the nation from its tumult.
"The fact that this one person is not among us changes everything," Abdullah said. "Afghanistan is a country without any institutions, without any systems, and what it needs in such a situation is a leader. We do not have one."
His pessimism is sobering.
On Tuesday, delegates from various factions of Afghanistan's anti-Taliban opposition are scheduled to meet in Bonn. The purpose is to devise a transitional government. It is perhaps a start, Abdullah agreed. But sooner or later, a national leader must rise from the squabbling ranks, and the doctor said he saw no strong candidate on the horizon.
"It is very sad because we have a great opportunity now with the world focused on Afghanistan," he said. "We will try our best, but with Massoud alive things would have been totally different. We would have had a man sensitive to every issue, someone who understood how to bypass obstacles, a person whose yes was a yes and whose no was a no."
His praise for the dead implies criticism of the living. "Massoud would not have come to Kabul without a political agreement with the Pashtuns," Abdullah said.
This is an odd statement, coming as it does from the Northern Alliance's chief spokesman. Many nations, including the US, preferred that the alliance stay out of the capital until a political compromise to govern the nation could be reached among Afghanistan's various ethnic groups, especially the largest one, the Pashtuns. But the alliance, which is primarily made up of Tajiks and Uzbeks, pushed ahead anyhow.
Not every observer of recent Afghan history would agree that Massoud, who was 48, was the man to bring this woebegone nation together. As Rabbani's defense minister, Massoud was part of a failed government that led to the public's welcome of the Taliban.
But Abdullah recalled those days in Kabul, from 1992 to 1996, quite differently. He spoke of Massoud, the military genius, the caring soul, the connoisseur of poetry.
"For these past years, as everyone else failed, he kept the country from falling entirely into the hands of the Taliban," Abdullah said. "It has been a lonely struggle. He would always tell me that one day every country would be on our side. `Now, they may not know what the Taliban are really like. But they will learn and they will join us.'"
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