In a joint statement, two lawmakers from the United States urged President Joe Biden to recognise the opposition forces in the Panjshir Valley. Congressman Mike Waltz and Senator Lindsey Graham wrote: "After speaking with Afghan Vice President Amrullah Saleh and representatives of Ahmad Massoud, we are calling on the Biden administration to recognise these leaders as the legitimate government representatives of Afghanistan. We ask the Biden administration to recognise that the Afghan Constitution is still intact, and the Afghan Taliban takeover is illegal," they said.
"These leaders chose to stay and fight for the freedoms of the Afghan people and oppose extremism. They have established a safe haven in the Panjshir Valley for Americans left behind, US allies, and those seeking freedom from Afghan Taliban rule," the lawmakers noted.
In the towering Hindu Kush, the Panjshir Valley has a single narrow entrance and is the last region not under Taliban control following their stunning blitz across Afghanistan. Local fighters held off the Soviets in the 1980s and the Taliban a decade later under the leadership of Ahmad Shah Massoud, a guerrilla fighter who attained near-mythic status before he was killed in a suicide bombing.
His 32-year-old foreign-educated son, Ahmad Massoud, and several top officials from the ousted Western-backed government have gathered in the valley. They include Vice President Amrullah Saleh, who claims to be the caretaker leader after President Ashraf Ghani fled the country.
They have vowed to resist the Taliban and are calling for Western aid to help roll them back. "I write from the Panjshir Valley today, ready to follow in my father's footsteps, with mujahideen fighters who are prepared to once again take on the Taliban," Massoud wrote in an op-ed for the Washington Post. "We have stores of ammunition and arms that we have patiently collected since my father's time, because we knew this day might come."
But experts say a successful resistance is highly unlikely and could potentially aggravate Afghanistan's already considerable problems.
While the Panjshir Valley remains as impregnable as ever, it is unclear how long its residents can hold out if the Taliban besiege the area or attack it using the US-supplied armaments they have seized in recent weeks. Western countries, stunned by the collapse of a costly, two-decade attempt at remaking Afghanistan, are unlikely to invest in another proxy war.
