The New York Times reports:

Two prominent Afghans who do not recognize the Taliban as Afghanistan’s rightful leaders have begun issuing challenges to the militants from a small but strategic pocket of territory that the Taliban do not control, according to an Afghan diplomat and statements by the leaders.

Although it is unclear how many followers are with them or how many arms they have, both men — the vice president in the toppled government and the son of a renowned mujahedeen leader — command respect among many Afghans.

Their demands at the moment, according to the diplomat, Mohammad Zahir Aghbar, who has been serving as the Afghan ambassador to Tajikistan, are relatively contained. If the Taliban want to avoid a fight and take control of the territory they are in — the difficult-to-penetrate Panjshir Valley — they will need to form an inclusive government, rather than try to lead on their own.

The emergence of even a small area of organized resistance to the Taliban raised the possibility of more fighting in the war-ravaged country and at least a future threat of an insurgency against the former insurgents now controlling Kabul.

The vice president in the ousted government, Amrullah Saleh, claimed in a post on Twitter to have the title of president under Afghanistan’s U.S.-brokered 2004 Constitution because he remains on Afghan territory while the elected president, Ashraf Ghani, has fled.

The other prominent holdout in the valley is Ahmad Massoud, the son of the mujahedeen leader Ahmad Shah Massoud, who successfully defended the Panjshir Valley in years of fighting against the Soviet Union in the 1980s and against the Taliban in the 1990s. [Continue reading…]

Ahmad Massoud writes:

In 1998, when I was 9 years old, my father, the mujahideen commander Ahmad Shah Massoud, gathered his soldiers in a cave in the Panjshir Valley of northern Afghanistan. They sat and listened as my father’s friend, French philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy, addressed them. “When you fight for your freedom,” Lévy said, “you fight also for our freedom.”

My father never forgot this as he fought against the Taliban regime. Up until the moment he was assassinated on Sept. 9, 2001, at the behest of the Taliban and al-Qaeda, he was fighting for the fate of Afghanistan but also for the West.

Now this common struggle is more essential than ever in these dark, tense hours for my homeland.

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. We have stores of ammunition and arms that we have patiently collected since my father’s time, because we knew this day might come. [Continue reading…]