Ashraf Ghani

Mohammad Ashraf Ghani Ahmadzai was the eighth and last president of Afghanistan, from 2014 until the Taliban took Kabul in August 2021. He was born in Logar province and left for schooling in Lebanon and then the United States. He took a doctorate in cultural anthropology at Columbia in 1983 and taught at Johns Hopkins. He spent most of the 1990s at the World Bank working on state institutions, and co-wrote Fixing Failed States, a book about how collapsed governments might be rebuilt — an unusually direct rehearsal for the job he would later hold. He returned to Afghanistan in December 2001 after the fall of the first Taliban government and served as finance minister under Hamid Karzai, introducing a new currency and rebuilding the revenue system. He resigned in 2004 to become chancellor of Kabul University, and ran for president in 2009, finishing fourth. His victory in 2014 was so bitterly disputed that the United States brokered a power-sharing arrangement with his rival Abdullah Abdullah, and the 2019 election produced a near-identical stand-off. His government was excluded from the negotiations between the United States and the Taliban in Doha, which set a withdrawal date without securing any settlement between Afghans. He was widely faulted for centralising decisions on a small circle of advisers and for quarrelling with the commanders he depended on. When the provincial capitals began falling in August 2021 the Afghan army collapsed within days. Ghani left the country on 15 August as the Taliban entered Kabul, an exit condemned across the Afghan political spectrum. He has lived in the United Arab Emirates since.

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