Afghanistan’s Ashraf Ghani Defends His Decision to Escape, Says He Is a Scapegoat

Mr. Ghani broke more than four months of silence in an interview aired on Thursday by the British Broadcasting Corp. He was interviewed not by a team BBC journalist but by Gen. Nick Carter, the not too long ago retired head of the British armed forces. Gen. Carter dealt extensively with Mr. Ghani all over his navy occupation, which integrated a stint as deputy commander of U.S.-led coalition forces in Afghanistan. He was a guest editor on the flagship BBC early morning radio present.

In the interview, Mr. Ghani blamed the U.S. for the collapse in Afghanistan, indicating that his federal government was slash out of negotiations with the Taliban. “They erased us,” he claimed. He additional that he really should have adopted the illustration of previous President
Hamid Karzai
in refusing to cooperate so closely with Washington.

“I trusted in our global partnership,” claimed Mr. Ghani, “instead of confronting consistently like my predecessor.”

In the weeks prior to the drop of Kabul, Mr. Ghani vowed repeatedly that he was ready to die defending his state. In the BBC interview, he claimed that his safety crew instructed him that if he took a stand, they would all be killed.

“On the early morning of that day, I had no inkling that by late afternoon, I would be leaving,” Mr. Ghani claimed. “I had to sacrifice myself in purchase to help save Kabul.”

Mr. Ghani claimed that even as he boarded a helicopter out of Kabul on Aug. 15, he thought he would fly to the japanese metropolis of Khost, apparently unaware that it had now fallen to the Taliban. Khost was the foundation of an anti-Taliban safety power properly trained by the U.S. Central Intelligence Company. He went as a substitute to Uzbekistan and from there to the United Arab Emirates, exactly where he continues to be. “I did not know exactly where we would go,” claimed Mr. Ghani.

At the time, two unique factions of the Taliban were closing in on Kabul. Mr. Ghani claimed he feared a “massive conflict” concerning them would destroy the city—which would have been a repeat of the civil war concerning the mujahedeen factions that fought around the Afghan funds in the early 1990s. There has been no open up conflict concerning Taliban factions in the previous four months.

Afghanistan, now totally below the handle of the Taliban, is suffering an financial meltdown, in component for the reason that Mr. Ghani’s departure scuttled strategies for a negotiated changeover of electricity. The new Taliban administration has found by itself below U.S. sanctions, with around $nine billion in Afghan central-financial institution assets frozen. Far more than 50 percent the population is going through starvation, in accordance to the United Nations.

Mr. Ghani’s interview unleashed a deluge of anger from Afghans on social media. Haroun Rahimi, formerly a regulation professor at the now defunct American University of Afghanistan, identified as Mr. Ghani and his close aides “treasonous cowards.” Abdullah Khenjani, a previous deputy minister, identified as the interview an insult to the miseries of the Afghan people today.

In the BBC interview, Mr. Ghani blamed veteran American diplomat Zalmay Khalilzad, who negotiated the 2020 Doha arrangement with the Taliban, for the Afghan republic’s collapse. “Process-wide, consequence-intelligent, the duty has to obviously rest” with Mr. Khalilzad’s crew, he claimed. “It grew to become an American, not an Afghan, issue….My life’s function has been destroyed, my values have been trampled on and I’ve been built a scapegoat.”

Mr. Ghani also dismissed as a Russian disinformation marketing campaign the allegations that he fled Afghanistan with hundreds of thousands and thousands of pounds. He claimed he welcomed a probe by
John Sopko,
the U.S. exclusive inspector general for Afghanistan, into people accusations, indicating he desired the U.N. or a private investigator to carry out an inquiry.

“I would be delighted to have any kind of investigation, like using a lie-detector test,” claimed Mr. Ghani, incorporating that riches weren’t in preserving with his lifestyle, so “What would I do with the cash?”

On the exact BBC present, Mr. Khalilzad claimed that culpability for the Taliban takeover was “first of all, a failure of the Afghan management,” with Mr. Ghani jogging absent and navy leaders refusing to fight.

Mr. Khalilzad also claimed that it is an accomplishment in its personal appropriate that the war in Afghanistan, which was leading to hundreds of fatalities just about every day, is now around. “I’m delighted that the killing fields of Afghanistan are no more,” he claimed.

Create to Saeed Shah at [email protected]