Ashraf Ghani

Politician

• Born: May 19, 1949
• Place of Birth: Logar Province, Afghanistan

Education: American University of Beirut; Columbia University

Ashraf Ghani was born and raised in Afghanistan and left the country as a young man to pursue a degree at the American University of Beirut in Lebanon. He later earned his PhD from Columbia University in New York. Political unrest at the time made it impossible for him to return to Afghanistan, so he remained in the United States for over twenty years, becoming a US citizen in 1990. Ghani subsequently taught at the University of California, Berkeley (1983) and at Johns Hopkins University (1983–91). He left academia and joined the World Bank in 1991 as lead anthropologist, focusing on the social impact of economic development.

Ghani returned to Afghanistan in December 2001 as a special advisor to the United Nations. He then joined the Afghan government, first as the national security and national economic adviser to President Hamid Karzai and then as Afghanistan’s finance minister from 2002–2004. Ghani then served as chancellor of the University of Kabul, and in 2005 he co-founded the Institute for State Effectiveness, a US-based nonpartisan group aimed at focusing citizen attention on the interrelatedness of individuals, state governments, and the global market economy. In 2008, Ghani published his theories on how to establish and maintain thriving states worldwide in Fixing Failed States: A Framework for Rebuilding a Fractured World.

In 2009, Ghani relinquished his US citizenship in order to run for president of Afghanistan. He was perceived as a modernist, however, and received only 3 percent of the vote. In April 2014, Ghani ran again for the position but neither he nor his opponent, Abdullah Abdullah, secured more than half of the votes. A June runoff vote was scheduled. Claims of voter fraud were issued by Abdullah’s side, and the candidates agreed to an independent audit of the votes, promising to abide by the results.

Background

Ashraf Ghani was born in 1949 to an ethnic Pashtun family from an influential Ahmadzai tribe. He was born in Logar Province, southeast of the capital city of Kabul, and completed his primary and secondary education in Kabul at the Habibia High School. He traveled to the United States for the first time as an exchange student in Oregon. Ghani’s father held a variety of administrative positions in the Afghan government, at that time a monarchy under King Zahir Shah.

In the late 1960s, Ghani traveled to Lebanon to attend the American University in Beirut, where he earned a degree in anthropology in 1973. The following year he returned to Afghanistan, where he taught at Kabul University before winning a government scholarship to pursue a master’s degree in anthropology at New York’s Columbia University. He left Afghanistan on August 26, 1977, intending to return two years later. In 1978, the Afghan monarchy fell to the pro-Russian Communist party, the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan. Members of Ghani’s family were imprisoned and he decided to remain in the United States, where he earned his PhD at Columbia. Ghani subsequently taught at the University of California, Berkeley (1983) and Johns Hopkins University (1983–1991). He was also a popular radio commentator in Afghanistan on the BBC Dari and Pashto services during the 1980s.

In 1985, Ghani received a Fulbright Scholarship and traveled to Pakistan to study the madrasas, or religious schools, where increasingly radicalized young Muslims were forming what would become the Taliban, a fundamentalist movement that would rule Afghanistan from 1996 to 2001.

Ghani left academia and joined the World Bank, an international financial institution that provides loans to developing countries, in 1991. He worked as lead anthropologist and focused on the social impact of economic development. He worked for the World Bank for eleven years, first in East Asia and later in China, India, and Russia. He attended World Bank leadership training programs at Harvard and Stanford universities, the latter of which analyzed large-scale transition projects such as the transformation of the coal industry in Russia. Ghani became a United States citizen in 1990.

The Karzai Regime

Ashraf Ghani left the World Bank after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. He was a frequent political commentator on international affairs for numerous American and international broadcasts. In October 2001, combined United States and United Kingdom forces invaded Afghanistan and ended the official Taliban government, though factions continued to operate in remote provinces. In December 2001, the United Nations (UN) Security Council established the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) to oversee military operations in the country and train Afghan National Security Forces. A group of twenty-five leaders from Afghanistan then met in Bonn, Germany, to craft the Bonn Agreement, which was the guiding document for returning political power to the people of Afghanistan. This group nominated Hamid Karzai to serve as interim president. Ghani returned to Afghanistan for the first time in twenty-four years in December 2001 as a special advisor to the United Nations. He assisted the UN special representative of the secretary general to Afghanistan, Lakhdar Brahimi, in the crafting of the Bonn Agreement, and then he joined the Afghan government first as the national security and national economic adviser to President Karzai, and then as finance minister from June 2002 to December 2004.

As finance minister, Ghani worked with other Afghan ministers to develop the loya jirgas (grand assemblies) that elected Karzai in October 2004 and established a new constitution in Afghanistan. During Karzai’s interim presidency from 2001–2004, Ghani developed a vision of statehood for Afghanistan that focused on economic development and regional cooperation in a global context. That won him international praise, and he was an author of the country’s National Development Framework. In 2003, he was named Best Finance Minister of Asia by Emerging Markets Magazine. He is credited with modernizing and streamlining the Afghan treasury systems, including the production of currency, in record time, and increasing transparency in government finances while managing a huge influx of international aid. After Karzai’s election in 2004, Ghani declined to join the cabinet and asked instead to be named chancellor of Kabul University so that he could return to academia.

Presidential Campaigns

In 2006, Ghani left the University of Kabul to found the Institute for State Effectiveness (ISE) with partner Clare Lockhart. This organization studies economic aid to developing countries and has researched strategies for successful growth in countries such as Haiti, Kosovo, Nepal, Sudan, and Uganda. In 2008, Lockhart and Ghani published a framework for successful statehood and economic growth called Fixing Failed States, which further enhanced Ghani’s reputation as a leader in international policy for developing nations.

In 2009, Ghani gave up his US citizenship in order to run for president of Afghanistan. His campaign emphasized economic growth and transparency in government, and Ghani reached out to Afghan people worldwide to support his campaign. His decision to fundraise internationally, along with his appointment of noted US presidential campaign strategist James Carville as a campaign advisor, were used by his opponents as proof of his allegiance to the West. Ghani won only three percent of the vote, and Karzai was elected president for another term.

With term limits barring Karzai from a third term in office, Ghani announced his candidacy for the Afghan presidency in 2014. He ran as an independent, with a platform of national reconciliation, economic development, and continuing US security presence in Afghanistan. Ghani chose as his running mate Abdul Rashid Dostum, a controversial former warlord from the minority ethnic Uzbek community. By April 2014, polls showed Ghani in a strong second place behind the candidate Abdullah Abdullah, former foreign affairs minister. Ghani’s campaign, while not specifically appealing to ethnic or tribal allegiances, benefited from the support of the Uzbek minority and Pashtun majority groups in Afghanistan, as well as an extensive grassroots campaign that mobilized over sixty thousand young volunteers.

Nearly 7 million Afghan citizens participated in the election on April 5, 2014. The preliminary results were announced on April 26, 2014, and were declared final in May, with Abdullah securing 45 percent of the vote and Ghani winning over 31 percent. Since neither candidate secured more than 50 percent of the total votes, a run-off election was held on June 14, amid allegations from both campaigns of widespread voter fraud. Because of increasing tensions between rival parties and concern over the potential for bloodshed, US secretary of state John Kerry traveled to Afghanistan in July to negotiate with Abdullah and Ghani. The candidates agreed to a complete audit of the votes and to accept the audit’s findings as to who won the election.

Presidency

A UN-supervised audit showed Ghani winning the election with 55 percent of the vote, and he took office in September 2014 as part of a power-sharing deal in which Abdullah accepted the newly created post of chief executive officer of Afghanistan. Ghani launched an ambitious program of international economic development for Afghanistan, seeking to strengthen ties with its Central Asian neighbors and make the country again a crossroads of trade in the region. Among the projects begun during his first term were the CASA-1000 (Central Asian–South Asian) electric transmission line, the Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India (TAPI) natural gas pipeline, and the China-Kyrgyzstan-Tajikistan-Afghanistan-Iran railway project.

But Ghani's emphasis on economic infrastructure could not obscure the country's continuing security woes, as the Taliban insurgency strengthened following the withdrawal of most foreign troops in 2014. The Taliban threat was compounded by the appearance in the country of a local affiliate of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), known as the Islamic State Khorasan Province. As ever in Afghanistan, the national government under Ghani struggled to extend its authority much beyond the national capital. Ghani made extensive outreach efforts to the Taliban, and in 2018 an unprecedented ceasefire between the government and insurgents took place during the holiday of Eid al-Fitr. Nonetheless, major moves in the peace process took place only between the Taliban and US representatives, as Taliban leaders refused to meet with representatives of the Afghan government, which they considered US puppets.

In February 2020, the administration of US President Donald Trump negotiated a withdrawal agreement with the Taliban that excluded Ghani and other members of the Afghan government. According to the agreement, the Afghan government would release 5,000 Taliban fighters and the US would withdraw its troops by May 1, 2021. On March 1, 2020, Ghani objected to the release of the Afghan government's Taliban prisoners, saying that his government was not a party to the agreement and that the US did not have the authority to free them. On March 10, after being pressured by the US, he ordered that 1,500 Taliban prisoners be released but slowed the release to 100 prisoners per day. By early September 2020, the Afghan government had freed all 5,000 Taliban prisoners and the Taliban had freed more than 1,000 Afghan government security forces. In mid-September peace talks between the Afghan government and the Taliban began in Doha, Qatar, though the Taliban continued to attack government forces during negotiations and increased attacks in the first quarter of 2021.

In April 2021, US President Joe Biden announced that he would honor the Trump administration's agreement to withdraw troops, but delayed full withdrawal until September 11, 2021. On July 8, 2021, Biden moved the deadline for US troop withdrawal to August 31. Although he acknowledged that the Taliban's military strength had increased to pre-2001 levels, he stated that a Taliban takeover of Afghanistan was not inevitable and that US intelligence did not think that the Afghan government was likely to collapse.

In early August 2021, the Taliban began taking control of Afghan provinces. By August 15, the Taliban had taken Kabul, prompting Ghani to flee the country for the United Arab Emirates. Former Afghan ministers and diplomats criticized him for his swift departure, saying that he had abandoned his country. Some also accused him of stealing $169 million from government funds, which he denied. In explaining his decision to leave, he said that he feared the Taliban would hang him and he wanted to prevent widespread bloodshed. Still, he supported talks between former Afghan officials and the Taliban and stated that he was negotiating his return to Afghanistan. In 2022, the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) called the former president paranoid, even believing the United States was aiming to eliminate him. In February of that year, the United Nations removed Ghani from the list of heads of state and named Naseer Ahmad Faiq as Chargé d'affaires of Afghanistan to the UN. Ghani remained in seclusion for more than two years after fleeing Afghanistan, although he did make a religious pilgrimage to Saudi Arabia in 2024.

Impact

Ashraf Ghani has made significant contributions not only to the reconstruction of his native Afghanistan, but to international economic and political development policy. Ghani and his colleagues at the Institute for State Effectiveness articulated ten principles for successful government in the book Fixing Failed States: A Framework for Rebuilding a Fractured World, which laid out specific, measurable guidelines for building successful statehood. Ghani articulated the idea of the "double compact" between the international community and national government and also the government and its people.

In addition, Ghani is widely credited with modernizing and streamlining Afghanistan’s treasury department during his time as finance minister. His tenure as president had mixed results, as he governed in an uneasy alliance with his rival Abdullah Abdullah and struggled to reduce government corruption and cope with the Taliban insurgency. His precipitous departure from office and the country as the Taliban took over accelerated his government's collapse, prompting allegations that he had betrayed his nation.

Bibliography

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Gall, Carlotta. "Ashraf Ghani Says He Fled Afghanistan to Avoid Being Lynched." The New York Times, 18 Aug. 2021, www.nytimes.com/2021/08/18/world/middleeast/ashraf-ghani-afghanistan-taliban.html. Accessed 1 Oct. 2024.

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Rahmati, Fidel. "Ashraf Ghani Makes First Visit to Saudi Arabia Since Escaping from Afghanistan." Khaama Press, 21 Feb. 2024, www.khaama.com/ashraf-ghani-makes-first-visit-to-saudi-arabia-since-escaping-from-afghanistan/. Accessed 1 Oct. 2024.

Rosenberg, Matthew. "Technocrat to Afghan Populist, Ashraf Ghani Is Transformed." New York Times, 11 June 2014, www.nytimes.com/2014/06/12/world/asia/technocrat-to-populist-an-afghan-transformed.html. Accessed 1 Oct. 2024.

Sieff, Kevin. "Once an American Professor, Ashraf Ghani Is Seeking the Afghan Presidency, Local-Style." Washington Post, 11 June 2014, www.washingtonpost.com/world/once-an-american-professor-ashraf-ghani-is-seeking-the-afghan-presidency-local-style/2014/06/10/c39a42d4-ef15-11e3-bf76-447a5df6411f‗story.html. Accessed 1 Oct. 2024.

"Who Is Ashraf Ghani? The Technocrat Who Sought to Rebuild Afghanistan." BBC News, 26 Sept. 2019, www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-27142426. Accessed 1 Oct. 2024.