Crescent International
The Taliban drove the last remnants of opposition from the Panjshir Valley on September 6.
The Panjshiris led by Ahmed Massoud and Amrullah Saleh proved no match for Taliban determination.
Massoud and Saleh fled to Tajikistan abandoning the very people they claimed to represent.
Both of them are unabashed Western and Indian agents.
Massoud tried to use his father’s Western-crafted reputation as a “fearless fighter.”
The senior Massoud was no such thing. He was lionized by the French and was not above cutting deals even with the Soviets during their time in Afghanistan.
When the Americans arrived, Massoud had no problem switching to them.
His forces, riding atop American tanks, triumphantly marched into Kabul and carried out massacres of Taliban fighters in the city.
As for Amrullah Saleh, he pompously claimed to be the “legitimate president” of Afghanistan after Ghani fled the country.
What kind of “legitimacy” did he have can be gleaned from the fact that in the 2019 presidential elections, only two million Afghans cast ballot amid massive charges of rigging.
Afghanistan’s population is 38-40 million.
There was other vile propaganda that surpassed even the demonization of the Taliban.
As Massoud and his side-kick Saleh (or the other way around) fled the country, they alleged that a Pakistani F-16 plane had been shot down in Panjshir.
Massoud, tweeted a photo of a military aircraft on its belly on the ground, with the caption saying: “The Pakistani Jet Plane that was shot down by the lion cubs.”
This was supposed to be their ah-ha moment: of Pakistani complicity and support for the Taliban.
The virulently anti- Pakistan Indian media also had a field day.
There were several problems with this claim.
Fact-check by Google reverse image showed that the plane was an American Falcon Eagle that had crash-landed during routine training at the Arizona-California border.
That is why, instead of falling into pieces, if it had been shot down, the image shown by Military.com, was that of an almost intact plane.
There was also no word about the supposedly Pakistani pilot. Did he disappear into thin air if his plane had been shot down over Panjshir Valley?
The military.com website in April 2018 carried an article about the crash landing of the American plane near the California border.
Indian media outlets led by Republic TV and Hindi news channel Zee Hindustan went even further.
In their desperation to show Pakistani “complicity” in Taliban successes, they
shared footage that they claimed showed Pakistani drones attacking remnants of the Panjshiri rebels.
Thanks to the Internet, such claims can be easily verified or refuted.
The fact-check website Boom found that the Indian-projected clip that went viral, was taken from a video-game, Arma-3.
We do not expect Indian or Western media outlets to tell the truth.
But lying through their teeth that can easily be refuted does nothing to their already tattered reputation.
They are, however, not bothered about their reputations.
Their mission is to discredit the Taliban and Pakistan.
The reason is simple: both the West led by the US and India have lost badly in Afghanistan.
They are trying to hide their embarrassing defeat at the hands of the lightly-armed Taliban.
Their argument is that the Taliban won because of Pakistani support.
Great.
That would clearly make Pakistan a super-power!
