Honorary citizenship is perhaps the highest and most exclusive honor that the United States federal government can bestow on a foreigner. Only eight people – Winston Churchill, a Righteous Swede Among the Nations, the founder of Pennsylvania and his wife, Mother Teresa, and three foreign Revolutionary War leaders, including the Marquis de Lafayette – have been deemed so vital to American national life or to human dignity as to receive the honor. Given the implicit standards that must be met to receive the honor (a wholehearted devotion to America and/or American values of democracy, equality, and human rights that went far beyond what was demanded of them as a foreigner), it seems odd that Ahmad Shah Massoud has never been considered as a candidate.

From a young age, Massoud, a Tajik Afghan, had an innate sense of ethics and justice that prompted him to defend a weaker child from bullies and, later, join the anticommunist mujahideen. He was terrifyingly effective in the war against the Soviet-backed government despite receiving far less support from his superiors or the Reagan administration than his peers (Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, an Islamist opium trafficker, was given precedence by Pakistan, the US' intermediary), though an outspoken few in the US argued on his behalf.

Massoud resisted Hekmatyar's attempts to establish an autocracy, first diplomatically and then with the use of force, and finally spent the remainder of his life fighting the Taliban, the only major figure of the interwar government to actually do so while remaining in the country. He resisted Taliban bribery in exchange for unjust peace, created and maintained democratic institutions in the territory he controlled, protected women's rights, and intervened against at least two forced marriages personally,

As early as March 2001 , Massoud was warning the West about an imminent threat posed by Osama Bin Laden. His assassination in September by al-Qaeda was an important step to cementing Taliban support for the group when the US inevitably retaliated against the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon only two days later. If your death is a prerequisite for an autocratic regime to support the biggest terrorist attack in history, then you must be doin something right. In the midst of all of this, Massoud was committed to fighting the opium trade in a country where the vast majority of warlords' armies depended on it.

Massoud had a deep respect for the West and for Western ideals of human dignity that persisted throughout his life, even when the respect was never reciprocated. He was a friend to America when America did not seek his friendship; he had every opportunity to follow men like Hekmatyar or Abdul Rashid Dostum in tolerating war crimes, embracing the opium trade, or fleeing the country and never did so. Outside of Afghanistan and in the United States, Massoud is a forgotten model of struggle for democracy and the democratic ethic who deserves to return to the public eye over twenty years after his death.

Given the extent of his achievements, courage, and moral fiber, nothing short of posthumous honorary citizenship of the country whose fundamental ideals he spent his life fighting for will do justice to Massoud; his son, Ahmad, who has revived the anti-Taliban resistance in his name after the Islamists came back to power in 2021; or to the Afghan-American community. Congress must move as soon as possible to grant him the honor, or to authorize President Biden or (upon his inauguration) President-elect Trump to do so.