The last time Abdul Karim saw Soviet forces he was a teenage mujahideen fighter shivering on an Afghan mountainside, clutching his Kalashnikov and wondering if winter or the Russians would bring death first. “But then I heard (mujahideen commander) Ahmad Shah Massoud over the walkie talkie saying the Russians had withdrawn, and we could come down,” Karim told AFP in Afghanistan’s legendary Panjshir Valley, where the Red Army was bled into retreat. It would be several more years before the Soviets left Afghanistan for good on February 15, 1989 having suffered the loss of 15,000 men — many in the unforgiving mountain passes of Panjshir. But for Karim, peace was short-lived — Afghanistan fractured into a ruinous civil war, and the young fighter was back on the frontlines. Thirty years later, Afghans who experienced the bloody aftermath of the Soviet withdrawal fear a repeat of that chaos as another invader — the United States — negotiates an exit from its longest war. The parallels are not lost on veterans whose dogged resistance brought a superpower to its knees. It was in the stronghold of Panjshir, north of Kabul, that Massoud lured the Soviets into high, narrow mountain passes where his loyal mujahideen lay in wait. Looming prospect of a US withdrawal and uncertainty as the Taliban takes center stage has stoked worry that history could repeat itself Massoud, dubbed the “The Lion of Panjshir,” is venerated not just in the valley — where his mujahideen rebuffed nine Soviet offensives — but across Afghanistan, where he is a celebrated national hero. His death at the hands of Al-Qaeda assassins, two days before September 11, 2001, is mourned every year and is marked by an official holiday. The road through Panjshir is punctuated by towering images of his likeness and the rusted skeletons of Soviet tanks, helicopters and heavy guns — “a graveyard of empires,” another former mujahideen, Mohammad Mirza, told AFP. Three decades on, talk of Massoud’s military cunning — outmaneuvring tanks and fighter helicopters through ambush and attrition — still evokes immense pride from his devoted foot soldiers. “Nine times they tried (to take the valley), and nine times they failed,” boasted another former mujahideen, who asked not to be named because he is now an Afghan police commander. Flicking open his phone, he scrolled through grainy photographs of his younger self at a feast with fellow mujahideen after the Red Army’s capitulation. “Of course we celebrated, like all countries celebrate their great victories,” he said, gazing wistfully at the photos. “But always I remember those we lost. I cannot forget.” Wali Mohammad was 14 when he joined the mujahideen. He said every anniversary was “a reminder that anyone who invades this country will face the same fate.” But the victory was bittersweet: it failed to deliver the lasting peace that has eluded Afghanistan for four grinding decades. Published in Daily Times, February 13th 2019.