Not much makes the press about Massood, but he was a hero to both the U.S. as well as Afghanistan.
His 2,000 tribesmen defeated 6 different Soviet Offensives headon on the battlefield, and per CCCP sources Massood's tiny band of tribesmen shot down 350 Soviet jet fighters and bombers.
You hear the endless claptrap of how Afghanistan is another Vietnam or how the U.S. will fall into the same trap in Afghanistan as did the CCCP, but that's all worthless, uneducated agitprop.
The remnants of Al Qaeda in Afghanistan, along with whatever is left of the Taliban, are less capable today of shooting down U.S. fighter jets than back when the Taliban ruled Afghanistan and actually had air defenses, for instance. And as a sidenote: the same thing holds true in Iraq. Unlike the resistance in Vietnam and in Afghanistan against the Soviets, the insurgents left in Iraq and Afghanistan are wholly incapable of shooting down U.S. jet fighters and bombers.
This simple fact (and there are thousands of other such facts) should make it clear that the U.S. is better than the forces who tried such things in those places in the past.
I.E. something is different.
Which means that Iraq and Afghanistan today aren't like Vietnam and Afghanistan of the past.
Massood himself was entirely capable of defeating the Taliban. He was bleeding the Taliban, convincing them to go on offensives into his mountain stronghold.
Just as he defeated the Soviets, so too was he eventually going to defeat the Taliban. U.S. airpower and specops, of course, sped up that process by years, perhaps even decades, but the Northern Alliance was going to win again regardless.
And Massood never forgot who armed him against the Soviets: the U.S.
Likewise, Afghans have never forgotten that Massood liberated Afghanistan from the Soviets.
Nor will the Northern Alliance forget who aided them in defeating the Taliban and Arab Al Qaeda.