Gavelwrench Fishfire | A Blog

Today’s post is part craft tutorial, part history lesson.

About two and a half to three years ago my good friend Alex returned from his second and final tour of duty in Afghanistan. Safe and sound to my great relief. He brought with him many amazing gifts, including a couple for yours truly. The first was a neon green paperweight with a scorpion suspended in resin with “I ♥ Afghanistan” written on the bottom. ¹

The second gift was a few yards of gorgeous, silky gray fabric. Alex explained at the time that the fabric was beside the point. He had actually bought the material because of the wrapping paper it came in, pictured on your right. The marketplace where he bought it was using giftwrap adorned with revered Afghan tribal leader Ahmad Shah Massoud, a.k.a. the Lion of Panjshir. “Do you know who that is?” Alex asked me.

I had to admit that the significance of Massoud escaped me, my knowledge of Afghan history being very paltry. Here’s the abbreviated version of what Alex told me (my recollection may be a bit sloppy, so read his Wikipedia entry and correct me if I’m wrong):

Massoud was a well-respected ethnic Tajik living in the Panjshir Valley who helped drive the Soviets out of Afghanistan in the 1980s. He went on to become the defense minister before the Taliban overthrew the Afghan government in the mid-1990s. He then assumed the leadership of what is commonly referred to as the Northern Alliance (a coalition of Afghan ethnic groups that fought the Taliban instead of each other). Massoud was considered a moderate, so naturally this meant he had his fair share of enemies.

By 2001, Massoud continued to warn of the Taliban and its links to al-Qaida, receiving very little support or attention from the United States as I understand it, though this is probably a very controversial topic I’m entering into. Anyway, by September he was dead. A group of suspected al-Qaida agents pretending to be foreign journalists exploded a bomb from inside the television camera they were using to “interview” him. Date of death: September 9, 2001, two days before the world shook. Coincidence? Probably (definitely) not.

Alex says it is a widely believed that had Massoud lived to see the events that followed and been around for the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, he would have been a powerful ally for the U.S. Of course, hindsight is 20/20. We can’t really control world events. But I don’t think it’s an overstatement to say that Massoud’s counterinsurgency expertise would have been pretty invaluable.

And all these years later, he’s still very much a part of the Afghan consciousness, plastered on billboards and wrapping paper. Wikipedia tells me he even has his own holiday. So for two years I left the fabric in its wrapping. Happy was I to let Massoud’s smiling face peer from my coffee table. Eventually I’d figure out what do with it.

In fact, what I decided to do was create a fabric-covered corkboard to handle some of the paper accumulating around my room (with the help of Alex and his wife Emily, naturally). Massoud would be preserved on the back.

Because the material was so thin, spray adhesive was useless. So we cut and staple gunned the the fabric around the edges. This might have been a hideous solution were it not for the fact that the staples blended so well with the gray material. It took all of 20 minutes with cutting, ironing and stapling.

Et voilà: a corkboard with a little history.

I know having a corkboard with an Afghan freedom fighter on it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. But it sort of reminds me of Alex’s time in Afghanistan. And how I used to G-chat for long hours with him and his buddies about ridiculous topics that seem very silly to me now considering the shit they had to go through. Like trying to avoid getting shot at by the exact same people that Massoud was trying to defeat.

No, I don’t have plans to visit Afghanistan anytime soon, nor am I trying to romanticize this unwinnable war. But you know, I can still appreciate Alex’s (and Massoud’s) contributions there… thanks to my corkboard.