It was more a collection of 70+ different militias without a formal hierarchy who, after the fall of Kabul in 1991, promptly started shooting each other for three years.
People like Saint Massoud et al, in other words. His canonization is largely due to being more likeable than all the alternatives, esp. the Taliban of course, and the timing of the final sucessful assassination attempt (to quote wikipedia and then take it from there: "The assassination of Massoud is considered to have a strong connection to the September 11 attacks in 2001 on U.S. soil which killed nearly 3,000 people and which appeared to be the terrorist attack that Massoud had warned against in his speech to the European Parliament several months earlier.
Analysts believe Osama bin Laden ordered the assassination to help his Taliban protectors and ensure he would have their protection and co-operation in Afghanistan." This completely baseless but understandable and widely held belief of Western secretservicemen and other insiders is behind a lot of the wrong decisions that led directly to Gitmo and Abu Ghraib and, arguably, to the Taliban's continued existence to this day.)
