{"id":7964,"date":"2017-06-10T18:57:12","date_gmt":"2017-06-10T16:57:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/openasia.org\/en\/?p=7964"},"modified":"2017-06-10T19:03:01","modified_gmt":"2017-06-10T17:03:01","slug":"afghanistans-theorist-in-chief-ashraf-ghani-2016","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/openasia.org\/en\/2017\/06\/afghanistans-theorist-in-chief-ashraf-ghani-2016\/","title":{"rendered":"AFGHANISTAN\u2019S THEORIST-IN-CHIEF, Ashraf Ghani (2016)"},"content":{"rendered":"

Source: The New Yorker<\/a><\/p>\n

By George Packer<\/a><\/p>\n

President Ashraf Ghani is an expert on failed states. Can he save his country from collapse?<\/h3>\n
\"\"<\/a>

Ghani is Afghanistan\u2019s Jimmy Carter\u2014a visionary technocrat who has alienated potential allies and has no feel for politics. Photograph by Adam Ferguson for The New Yorker<\/p><\/div>\n

Ashraf Ghani, the President of Afghanistan, wakes up before five every morning and reads for two or three hours. He makes his way daily through an inch-thick stack of official documents. He reads proposals by applicants competing for the job of mayor of Herat and chooses the winner. He reads presentations by forty-four city engineers for improvements to Greater Kabul. He has been known to write his own talking points and do his own research on upcoming visitors. Before meeting the Australian foreign minister, he read the Australian government\u2019s white paper on foreign aid. He read four hundred pages of the Senate Intelligence Committee\u2019s torture report on the day of its release, and the next day he apologized to General John Campbell, the American commander in Afghanistan, for having not quite finished it. He reads books on the transition from socialism to capitalism in Eastern Europe, on the Central Asian enlightenment of a thousand years ago, on modern warfare, on the history of Afghanistan\u2019s rivers. He lives and works in the Arg\u2014a complex of palaces inside a nineteenth-century fortress in central Kabul\u2014where books, marked up in pencil, lie open on desks and tables.<\/p>\n

Two decades ago, Ghani lost most of his stomach to cancer. He has to eat small portions of food, such as packets of dates, half a dozen times a day. He sometimes takes digestive breaks, resting\u2014and reading\u2014on a narrow bed in an alcove behind his office in Gul Khana Palace. Or he sits with a book in his favorite spot, under a chinar tree in the garden of Haram Sarai Palace, where the library of the late King Zahir is preserved. During the Presidency of Ghani\u2019s predecessor, Hamid Karzai, the library was a dusty pile of antique volumes. After Ghani took office, in September, 2014, he organized the royal collection. Whereas Karzai filled the palace with visitors and received petitioners during meals, Ghani often eats alone. After twelve years in power, Karzai and his family walked away with hundreds of millions of dollars from Afghan and international coffers. Ghani\u2019s net worth, according to his declaration of assets, is about four million dollars. It consists largely of his house, on four acres in western Kabul, and his collection of seven thousand books.<\/p>\n

A trained anthropologist who spent years doing field work for the World Bank, Ghani has been in and out of the Afghan government ever since the overthrow of the Taliban, in 2001. His abiding concern has been how to create viable institutions in poor countries overrun with violence, focussing on states that can\u2019t enforce laws, create fair markets, collect taxes, provide services, or keep citizens safe. In 2006, Ghani and his longtime collaborator, a British human-rights lawyer named Clare Lockhart, started a consultancy, the Institute for State Effectiveness, in Washington, D.C. Two years later, they published \u201cFixing Failed States: A Framework for Rebuilding a Fractured World.\u201d It describes the core functions of a state and suggests such measures as tapping the expertise of citizens in building institutions. By then, the theme was no longer a technical subject. The chaos in Somalia, Iraq, Pakistan, and Afghanistan threatened global security.<\/p>\n

Theorists are rarely given such a dramatic chance to put their ideas into practice. Afghanistan has been at war ever since the Soviet invasion of 1979, when Ghani was a thirty-year-old doctoral candidate at Columbia University. Most of the country, including several provincial capitals, is threatened by the Taliban, even as the insurgency devolves into a network of narco-criminal enterprises. In sixty per cent of Afghanistan\u2019s three hundred and ninety-eight districts, state control doesn\u2019t exist beyond a lonely government building and a market. Al Qaeda and the Islamic State have established a presence in the east. Afghanistan can\u2019t police its borders, and its neighbors give sanctuary and assistance to insurgents. (In May, Mullah Mansour, the Taliban leader, was killed by an American drone strike while driving from Zahedan, Iran, where he reportedly consulted with Iranian officials, to his base, in Quetta, Pakistan, with a fraudulent Pakistani passport.) Afghanistan\u2019s finances depend on foreign aid and opium. Corruption is endemic. After the departure of a hundred and twenty-seven thousand foreign troops, in 2014, the economy collapsed, unemployment soared, and hundreds of thousands of Afghans abandoned the country. Ghani is the elected President of a failed state.<\/p>\n

A slight man with a short gray beard and deep-set eyes under a bald dome, Ghani bears a resemblance to Gandhi, except that he does not seem like a man at peace. He hunches over and winces, head tilted, and when he gestures he keeps his elbows pinned to his sides. He laughs at odd moments, and he can\u2019t control his temper. Young loyalists surround him, but he has alienated powerful allies. Isolated in the Arg, Ghani works killingly long hours and buries himself in projects that should be left to subordinates. \u201cBecause he\u2019s been an academic for a very long time, he just can\u2019t help a mode of working that requires him to study and analyze every problem,\u201d a senior Afghan official said. \u201cIf he asked for a file on garbage collection in Kabul, and he received a binder of five hundred pages, he would finish it that night\u2014and then take copious notes.\u201d<\/p>\n

Whereas Karzai talked warmly with guests for hours, leaving everyone happy, Ghani disdains small talk, and visitors come away feeling intimidated or slighted. Once, in Kabul, the President scheduled fifteen minutes for Ismail Khan, a powerful warlord from western Afghanistan. Jelani Popal, one of Ghani\u2019s closest advisers, told him, \u201cSee him for as long as he wants or don\u2019t see him at all\u2014but you can\u2019t spend just fifteen minutes.\u201d Ghani stood firm: the corrupt and brutal emir of Herat was worth exactly a quarter of an hour.<\/p>\n

Ghani is a visionary technocrat who thinks twenty years ahead, with a deep understanding of what has destroyed his country and what might yet save it. \u201cHe\u2019s incorruptible,\u201d the senior official said. \u201cHe wants to transform the country. And he can do it. But it seems as if everything is arrayed against him.\u201d Ghani is the kind of reformer that the American government desperately needed as a partner during the erratic later years of Karzai\u2019s rule. Yet he has few admirers in the State Department, and in Kabul the \u00e9lite don\u2019t hide their contempt. They call Ghani an arrogant micromanager and say that he has no close friends, no feel for politics\u2014that he is the leader of a country that exists only in his own mind. Ghani is Afghanistan\u2019s Jimmy Carter.<\/p>\n

Many observers don\u2019t expect Ghani to complete his term, which ends in 2019, and 2016 is described as a year of national survival. \u201cThis is the year of living dangerously,\u201d Scott Guggenheim, an American economic adviser to Ghani, said. \u201cHe\u2019ll either make it or he won\u2019t.\u201d<\/p>\n

The stone walls of the Arg are fortified with concrete blast walls and checkpoints manned by armed guards. Outside, barricades and razor wire divide Kabul\u2019s streets into the private armed encampments where Afghan \u00e9lites and foreign diplomats live. The public must steer clear, and the city is choked with traffic. When it rains, the rutted streets flood; when fighting in the north cuts power lines, the streets go dark. Periodically, a suicide bomber detonates a murderous payload. American officials no longer risk driving\u2014from dawn to dark, helicopters clatter over the U.S. Embassy compound. Smelling weakness, Afghan politicians scheme in lavish compounds built with stolen money, each convinced that he should be inside the Arg. In the mountains around Kabul, the Taliban are just a few miles away.<\/p>\n

\u201cMy father\u2019s mother really had a profound influence on me,\u201d Ghani said. \u201cShe literally began her day with an hour of reading. But the most fundamental impact was education.\u201d We were seated in facing chairs, in a ceremonial room on the second floor of Gul Khana Palace. The soaring walls and pillars were of green onyx, the doors of inlaid walnut. Ghani, by contrast, looked like a well-off shopkeeper, in a traditional dark-gray shalwar kameez and a black coat, conveying that he is a native son and drawing a firm line between his current life and the decades he spent in American universities and with global institutions.<\/p>\n

In 2011, Ghani and his daughter, Mariam\u2014an artist who lives in Brooklyn\u2014published a pamphlet titled \u201cAfghanistan: A Lexicon,\u201d a mini-encyclopedia that chronicles cycles of reform, reaction, and chaos that have recurred in the country. The opening entry is on Amanullah, Afghanistan\u2019s king from 1919 to 1929. Amanullah was the first great modernizer: he oversaw the writing of a constitution, improved education, encouraged freedoms for women, and planned an expansion of the capital. He also fought to make Afghanistan\u2019s foreign policy independent of Britain. But Amanullah offended key elements of society, including the mullahs, and he was overthrown by tribal leaders. Although Amanullah \u201caccomplished a remarkable amount,\u201d Ashraf and Mariam Ghani wrote, he \u201cdid not succeed in permanently changing Afghanistan, since his ultimate failure to forge a broad political consensus for his reforms left him vulnerable to rural rebellion.\u201d Rapid modernization undone by conservative revolt became both template and warning for Afghan progressives, \u201cwho have returned again and again to his unfinished project, only to succumb to their own blind spots.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ghani comes from a prominent Pashtun family. His paternal grandfather, a military commander, helped install King Nadir, who assumed power shortly after Amanullah\u2019s overthrow, in 1929. Ghani\u2019s father was a senior transport official under Nadir\u2019s son, King Zahir, who reigned for forty years. Ghani was born in 1949. He grew up in Kabul\u2019s old city, spending weekends and vacations riding horses and hunting on the ancestral farm, forty miles south. He was teased at school\u2014he was undersized, and sometimes bent over like an old man\u2014but he impressed classmates with his seriousness. In 1966, his junior year of high school, he travelled to America as an exchange student. At his new school, in Oregon, Ghani won a student-council seat reserved for a foreigner. \u201cThe first council meeting, we made some simple decisions,\u201d he said. \u201cLo and behold, the next week they were implemented, because the council had access to money.\u201d The experience shaped his thinking about development: \u201cYou can get together, you can talk as much as you want, but if there\u2019s not a decision-making process\u2014that<\/em>\u2019s<\/em> where democracy really matters.\u201d<\/p>\n

In 1973, Ghani received a political-science degree from the American University of Beirut, where he fell in love with Rula Saade, a Lebanese Christian. They got engaged, and in 1974, after Ghani returned to Kabul to teach, his prospective father-in-law paid him a visit. \u201cYou\u2019re going to end up in politics and you\u2019re going to ruin my daughter\u2019s life,\u201d Rula\u2019s father said. Ghani replied, not quite truthfully, \u201cI\u2019m totally committed to being an academic.\u201d (The couple married in 1975, and, in addition to Mariam, they have a son, Tarek.)<\/p>\n

In July, 1973, the monarchy was overthrown by the King\u2019s cousin Daoud, who became Afghanistan\u2019s first President. Daoud initially aligned himself with the Communists and, according to the Ghani \u201cLexicon,\u201d he \u201creiterated the flawed model of modernization imposed from above.\u201d In 1978, Communist troops shot Daoud to death as he tried to hide behind a pillar in Gul Khana Palace. Assassination followed assassination until the end of 1979, when the Soviets invaded and the jihad began. The Arg is haunted by its murdered occupants.<\/p>\n

In 1977, Ghani and his family left Afghanistan, and he didn\u2019t live there again for a quarter century. At Columbia, he completed a dissertation in cultural anthropology. \u201cProduction and Domination: Afghanistan, 1747-1901\u201d analyzes the nation\u2019s difficulty in building a centralized state in terms of its economic backwardness. The writing is almost impenetrable: \u201cBy focusing on movements of concomitant structures, I have attempted to isolate the systemic relations among the changing or non-changing elements that combine to form a structure.\u201d The author moves between clouds of abstraction and mounds of data\u2014nineteenth-century irrigation methods in Herat, kinship networks in Pashtun financial systems\u2014without readily discernible priorities.<\/p>\n

In the eighties, Ghani taught at Berkeley and at Johns Hopkins, and in 1991 he became an anthropologist for the World Bank, based in Washington, D.C. Travelling half the year, he became an expert on finance in Russia, China, and India. \u201cHe really had a moral purpose\u2014solving poverty for real people,\u201d Clare Lockhart said. \u201cWhen he arrived in capital cities, he\u2019d go to the markets to see what people were buying and selling, then he\u2019d go out to the provinces and villages. He\u2019d interview groups of miners.\u201d Such field work was unusual for a World Bank official. James Wolfensohn, who became president of the bank in 1995, shifted its emphasis from simply lending money to poor countries to attempting to reduce poverty. He wanted to know why African and Latin American countries that followed the bank\u2019s liberalization policies remained poor. The answer had to do with corruption, weak institutions, and ill-conceived practices by donors. Wolfensohn ordered a review of the bank\u2019s programs, and Ghani submitted many blistering critiques, which made him unpopular with his colleagues.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, he was preparing for a future in Afghanistan. In 1997, with the Taliban controlling most of the country, a Columbia graduate student interviewed Ghani at the World Bank. \u201cWhen we get peace in Afghanistan, we\u2019ll go to New Zealand to learn best practices for raising sheep,\u201d Ghani said. \u201cWe\u2019ll go to Switzerland and study hydroelectric projects.\u201d Afghanistan\u2014mountains, deserts, ungoverned spaces\u2014has always seemed to offer a blank slate for utopian dreamers: British imperialists, hippie travellers, Communists, Islamists, international do-gooders. Alex Thier, who worked for the U.N. in Afghanistan in the nineties and, later, with Ghani in Kabul, described him as an \u201cN.G.O.-style revolutionary, as if he grew up in a cadre of the World Bank rather than in the Communist Party.\u201d To be a visionary is, in some ways, to be depersonalized, to refuse to see what\u2019s in front of one\u2019s face.<\/p>\n

On September 11, 2001, Ghani was at his desk in Washington, and he knew immediately that everything was about to change for Afghanistan. He drafted a five-step plan for a political transition to a broad-based Afghan government that could be held accountable for rebuilding the country; he warned against funding and arming the warlords who had brought Afghanistan to ruin and the Taliban to power. During the American-led war against the Taliban, a small group of experts\u2014including Lockhart, the Afghanistan scholar Barnett Rubin, and the Algerian diplomat Lakhdar Brahimi, then the U.N. special envoy for Afghanistan\u2014met at Ghani\u2019s house outside Washington. That December, the group\u2019s work influenced the Bonn Agreement, which mapped steps toward representative rule, while leaving unresolved the conflict between Ghani\u2019s vision of a modern state and the interests of regional power brokers.<\/p>\n

Six months later, Karzai became Afghanistan\u2019s leader. Ghani\u2019s first job in the new administration was to co\u00f6rdinate and track foreign aid. He believed that Afghans needed to set their own priorities for development rather than be at the mercy of the conflicting agendas of foreign countries and international agencies. Some Afghans and Westerners saw Ghani, after decades in the U.S., as a foreigner in his own land. But he is a prickly nationalist who would have been an egghead anywhere. He had a particular animus toward Western aid officials who had plenty of money and power but scant knowledge or humility. He once dressed down a contingent from the U.S. Agency for International Development for their incompetence. Ghani was among the first to foresee that a flood of foreign aid could enrich foreign contractors and turn officials corrupt while doing little for ordinary Afghans.<\/p>\n

With Hanif Atmar, the Minister of Rural Development, Ghani created the National Solidarity Program\u2014grants in amounts of twenty thousand to sixty thousand dollars for twenty-three thousand Afghan villages, largely funded by the World Bank. (The idea came from similar World Bank programs that Ghani had studied in Indonesia and India.) Afghan villagers were required to elect a council of men and women, devise their own goals\u2014such as clean water or a new school\u2014and make public their accounting figures. In one case, thirty-seven villages pooled their money to build a maternity hospital. Clare Lockhart met families just returned from exile in Iran, living in animal-skin shelters. One woman, describing the importance of the grant, told her, \u201cIt\u2019s not about the money.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cDon\u2019t tell her that,\u201d another villager said. \u201cShe\u2019ll take the money away.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI don\u2019t have that authority,\u201d Lockhart explained.<\/p>\n

The first woman finished her thought: \u201cIt\u2019s that we\u2019re<\/em> trusted to do this.\u201d<\/p>\n

The N.S.P. was one of Afghanistan\u2019s most successful and least corrupt programs. A new school cost a sixth of one built with a U.S.A.I.D. contract. Paul O\u2019Brien, an Irishman who served as an adviser to Ghani, said Ghani understood that \u201cthe key to development is strong domestic institutions that can regulate all the actors around them, including<\/em> international do-gooders.\u201d When Ghani challenged foreigners to tell him what accountability measures they wanted in return for giving Afghan institutions control of the money and the agenda, \u201cthey wouldn\u2019t do it,\u201d O\u2019Brien said. Donors had brought their \u201cdevelopment army in all its glory, and that meant outputs and contracts and boxes checked.\u201d<\/p>\n

Instead of sending money to local communities through Afghan channels, donors like U.S.A.I.D. bid out contracts to large international companies, which in turn hired subcontractors and private security companies, none of which had a long-term stake in Afghanistan. In a 2005 ted <\/small>talk on failed states, Ghani called such programs \u201cthe ugly face of the developed world to the developing countries,\u201d adding, \u201cTens of billions of dollars are supposedly spent on building capacity with people who are paid up to fifteen hundred dollars a day, who are incapable of thinking creatively or organically.\u201d<\/p>\n

The National Solidarity Program didn\u2019t get to write Afghanistan\u2019s future. Some estimate that during the peak years of foreign spending on Afghanistan only ten to twenty cents of every aid dollar reached the intended beneficiaries. Waste on a scale of several hundred billion dollars is the work of many authors, but the U.S. government was among the chief ones.<\/p>\n

In the summer of 2002, Karzai named Ghani Minister of Finance. The Ministries of Interior, Defense, and Foreign Affairs were more obvious bases for building personal power, but Ghani put in twenty-hour days, holding staff meetings at 7 a.m.<\/small>, in a building with shattered windows and no heat. He introduced anti-corruption measures, established a centralized revenue system, and created a new currency, supporting it with the traditional hawala<\/em> network of money trading. He urged his staff to take on the drug and land mafias that were infiltrating the state, saying, \u201cWe need to hit them everywhere, so they won\u2019t have the space to establish networks.\u201d This was the blank-slate phase of post-Taliban Afghanistan, and Ghani became the most effective figure in the new government. \u201cThe golden period of the Karzai rule was when Ashraf Ghani was Finance Minister,\u201d Jelani Popal, a deputy in the Finance Ministry, said. \u201cKarzai was a people person and kept the integrity of the state and society, but Ghani was the de-facto Prime Minister and the main engine of reform.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ghani\u2019s temper, perhaps inflamed by the effects of his stomach cancer, became notorious. He shouted at Afghan staff and Western advisers alike. Zalmay Khalilzad, then the U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan, had known him for decades\u2014they were in college together in Beirut\u2014and he challenged Ghani: \u201cWhy do you have such a bad temper?\u201d Ghani denied it, Khalilzad repeated stories he\u2019d heard, and they went back and forth until Ghani slammed his fist on a table and exploded: \u201cI don\u2019t have a temper!<\/em>\u201d<\/p>\n

Ghani\u2019s combination of probity and arrogance antagonized the entire Karzai cabinet. When he discovered that the Minister of Defense, the Tajik warlord Mohammed Fahim, was padding his payroll with tens of thousands of \u201cghost\u201d troops, Ghani slashed Fahim\u2019s budget. Ghani later heard that Fahim went to the Arg and told Karzai that he wanted to murder Ghani\u2014to which Karzai replied, \u201cThere\u2019s a very long line for killing Ashraf.\u201d<\/p>\n

In 2004, after being elected President, Karzai made noises about dismissing Ghani. Lakhdar Brahimi asked Karzai, \u201cDo you have anybody better than him?\u201d Karzai said no. Brahimi encouraged him to try to work with Ghani, even though he knew that nobody in the cabinet supported Ghani, either. Brahimi asked Ghani, \u201cYou\u2019ve been here three years and you don\u2019t have a friend in this country?\u201d Ali Jalali, then the Minister of Interior, said that Ghani had clashed with cabinet members from the Northern Alliance, such as Fahim, in his campaign to take power away from the warlords. Several people also told me that Khalilzad had been competing with Ghani since their university days and leveraged American influence over Karzai to undermine Ghani. (Khalilzad said that he had tried to get Karzai to change his mind, but failed.) By 2005, Ghani was gone. He later insisted that he had resigned because the government was descending into narco-corruption.<\/p>\n

The government lost its brightest light. \u201cIf he had stayed, Afghanistan would be completely different today,\u201d Popal said. Karzai, a master at keeping his various constituencies in the tent, had no interest in the ideas that consumed Ghani. With the American troop presence too small to secure the country, Karzai used foreign largesse to empower local strongmen, whose behavior led to the return of the Taliban.<\/p>\n

Ghani briefly became chancellor of Kabul University. A former student there remembers that he was always either yelling at groups of undergraduates or promising things that he couldn\u2019t deliver\u2014a state-of-the-art library, for example. Karzai tried repeatedly to bring Ghani back. Once, in 2008, he summoned Ghani and Popal to the Arg. \u201cI made a mistake,\u201d Karzai said. \u201cI\u2019ll give you more power than before.\u201d He offered Ghani the Ministry of Interior. Ghani refused, saying, \u201cYou are a very suspicious man. You listened to people and fired me.\u201d Privately, Ghani confided to Popal that he planned to run for President against Karzai the next year. By then, Popal was in charge of the powerful department of local governance. \u201cI know all the districts,\u201d he told Ghani. \u201cYou don\u2019t have a chance.\u201d Ghani insisted that he could give speeches that would mobilize millions of Afghans. \u201cIt doesn\u2019t work that way,\u201d Popal told him. \u201cYou need to establish relationships.\u201d<\/p>\n

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I met Ghani in Kabul in the spring of 2009, as the campaign was about to begin. He had given up his American citizenship in order to run. He described a \u201cdouble failure\u201d in Afghanistan: a failure of imagination by the international community and a failure by Afghan \u00e9lites \u201cto be the founding fathers\u2014and mothers, because there are some\u2014of a new state.\u201d He received a group of university students in his home, a beautiful post-and-beam structure in traditional Nuristani style. Ghani listened to the students complain about nato<\/small> firepower killing civilians, about Afghan corruption, about American manipulation of the election in Karzai\u2019s favor. They didn\u2019t know that American officials, disillusioned with Karzai, had encouraged Ghani to run against him. Before I left, Ghani gave me a chapan<\/em>, the intricately woven coat of northern Afghanistan, and a copy of \u201cFixing Failed States.\u201d I saw no sign of a volatile character\u2014he was confident of his prospects.<\/p>\n

But Popal was right: Ghani had no following, and he received a humiliating three per cent of the vote. Karzai was re\u00eblected amid charges of rampant voter fraud that embittered his closest challenger, Abdullah Abdullah, and fatally damaged his relationship with the United States. Karzai, who could not run for a third term, withdrew into the Arg and steeped himself in conspiracy theories about the West. A billion-dollar Ponzi scheme was exposed at the country\u2019s largest bank. Karzai\u2019s final years in office were a political death agony.<\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

During this period, Ghani was in charge of preparing Afghanistan for the withdrawal of nato<\/small> forces and the handover of military authority to the Afghan Army by the end of 2014. The job, which was pro bono, allowed him to travel around the country, visiting provincial governors, corps commanders, and district police chiefs. It was a kind of listening tour, convincing him of the people\u2019s desire for reform.<\/p>\n

In 2014, he ran again for President. He published a three-hundred-page campaign manifesto, \u201cContinuity and Change.\u201d It was a classic Ghani production. \u201cIt is very smart in diagnosing all these problems,\u201d Alex Thier said. \u201cHe\u2019s an idea factory with all these proposals\u2014but you don\u2019t read it with a sense that they will all be accomplished.\u201d When you cut through the language, the manifesto is a call for the empowerment of the Afghan people against corrupt \u00e9lites: \u201cOutstanding individuals, intellectuals, women, young people, producers of culture, workers, and other parts of society wish for change, and we want to respond to this wish.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ghani stopped wearing Western suits and started using his tribal name, Ahmadzai. He hired young campaign aides who were savvy about social media, and he gave rousing speeches declaring that \u201cevery Afghan is equal\u201d and that \u201cour masters will be the people of Afghanistan.\u201d There were rumors that he was taking anger-management classes.<\/p>\n

During the campaign, Farkhunda Naderi, a female member of parliament, suggested in a TV debate that the next President should name a woman\u2014the first\u2014to Afghanistan\u2019s high court, which has the power to nullify laws deemed contrary to Islamic law. \u201cUnless you get a woman on the Supreme Court, all the rights women get are on the surface and symbolic,\u201d she told me. Naderi had suggested the idea to Karzai, only to be told that no woman was qualified. Karzai\u2019s wife, a doctor, was rarely seen in public during his years in the Arg, but Rula Ghani was a prominent surrogate for her husband during the campaign, to the delight of some Afghans and to the chagrin of others. During a campaign speech at a Kabul high school, Ghani announced his intention to select a woman for the Supreme Court. Naderi, who was in attendance, listened in disbelief. \u201cI was like, \u2018Wow!\u2019 He was brave to do that.\u201d<\/p>\n

In a naked attempt to win the votes of minority Uzbeks, Ghani selected Abdul Rashid Dostum, the Uzbek warlord, as a candidate for Vice-President. Dostum is accused of so many killings that he\u2019s barred from entering the United States. Ghani once called him \u201ca known killer.\u201d Naderi was forced to defend Ghani to friends who supported human rights. \u201cIt means he\u2019s a politician,\u201d she told them. \u201cIf you\u2019re going to do something in Afghanistan, you can\u2019t import other people. You have to do something with the people who are here.\u201d This had been the dilemma for Afghan reformers ever since King Amanullah: how, when, and whether to compromise. Ghani was showing that he, too, could play politics the old, dirty way.<\/p>\n

In the first round of voting, on April 5th, Ghani came in second among eight candidates, with thirty-one per cent. Abdullah Abdullah, who had lost to Karzai in 2009, led, with forty-five per cent. Elegant and diplomatic, Abdullah was a familiar figure in Afghan politics. Of Pashtun and Tajik parentage, he was identified politically with the Tajiks. Abdullah and Ghani had served together in the first Karzai cabinet, with Abdullah as Foreign Minister, and they shared pro-Western, pro-reform, anti-corruption views. \u201cI\u2019ve known Abdullah since 1995 and Ghani since 2002,\u201d Thier said. \u201cThese guys really care. They are not cynical, they\u2019re not trying to turn the affairs of state to their own benefit.\u201d Three-quarters of the nearly seven million voters chose one of these two candidates\u2014evidence that, despite years of war, foreign interference, and disappointed hopes, Afghans still wanted a modern country.<\/p>\n

Inevitably, the runoff between Ghani and Abdullah, in June, played out along ethnic lines, with Pashtuns\u2014the country\u2019s largest group\u2014consolidating around Ghani. When early official results showed Ghani leading, Abdullah claimed a fraud on the scale of the 2009 election. An adviser to Abdullah blamed Karzai and his handpicked election commissioners, saying that they wanted power to revert to agreements among \u00e9lites, with Karzai as kingmaker, if not king.<\/p>\n

Fifteen thousand Abdullah supporters marched on the Arg to protest the election. Ghani\u2019s circle was equally adamant. His campaign co\u00f6rdinator at the time, Hamdullah Mohib, recalls a meeting in which Ghani advisers discussed bringing a hundred thousand people into the streets. Ghani told them, in his didactic way, \u201cA civil war lasts on average ten or fifteen years, and even then they\u2019re very hard to end\u2014ours is still going on. I can guarantee that tomorrow, if you march on Kabul, the first bullet will be fired. If anyone can guarantee when the last bullet will be fired, then<\/em> I\u2019ll allow the march.\u201d<\/p>\n

<\/a><\/a><\/p>\n

The U.N. mission in Kabul supervised an audit. James Cunningham, the American Ambassador at the time, recalls, \u201cThe U.N. and E.U. people really worked their asses off, being accused every day of malfeasance by one side or the other. There were fistfights inside hot warehouses, and lots of yelling.\u201d The audit showed fraud on both sides, more of it favoring Ghani than Abdullah. American officials feared that the dispute could cause Afghanistan to fracture along ethnic lines. In July, 2014, a document circulated in the State Department:<\/p>\n

\n

We should be modest about the audit mechanism\u2014given the apparent closeness of the election and the involvement of the chief electoral officer in fraud, it is almost impossible that we will ever know who won\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0. with sufficient clarity to persuade his disappointed opponent. The audits are a way to buy time for political accommodations and eventually to certify and add some credibility to a result.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

American officials spent the summer negotiating a deal between Ghani and Abdullah. The loser would have to accept the other as President, without conceding the final vote, and in return would be named Chief Executive Officer\u2014a Prime Ministerial position that doesn\u2019t exist in the Afghan constitution. (The suggestion came from Ghani.) The results of the audit would not be released, to spare the defeated candidate a loss of face. Both Ghani\u2019s and Abdullah\u2019s camps resisted the arrangement, each certain that it had won outright. According to a U.S. intelligence assessment that September, there was a strong chance that, for lack of an agreement, Karzai would stay in office or that Abdullah and the Northern Alliance would declare a parallel government. Daniel Feldman, the U.S. Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, who was involved in the negotiations, said, \u201cIf Karzai had stayed in, or if there had been a parallel government, that would have been the end of our presence in Afghanistan, and probably the end of<\/em> Afghanistan\u2014civil war on top of the Taliban.\u201d<\/p>\n

By mid-September, the audit had been finished: Ghani was judged the winner. But Abdullah wasn\u2019t ready to concede. Secretary of State John Kerry called Ghani from Paris; citing the audit, he said that if fraudulent votes were discounted the gap closed significantly in Abdullah\u2019s favor. Ghani took this to mean that the U.S. believed he had lost an election he\u2019d tried to steal. If he was taking anger-management classes, they didn\u2019t work. He summoned Feldman to his house for a chewing-out that lasted several hours. Grudgingly, Ghani and Abdullah accepted a compromise. On September 21st, they signed a document creating a National Unity Government. On the crucial issue of the distribution of political appointments, Abdullah had wanted the language to read \u201cequal\u201d and Ghani \u201cfair.\u201d They compromised on \u201cequitable.\u201d Since there was no word for it in Dari, one had to be invented: bara barguna<\/em>, or \u201cequalish.\u201d The N.U.G. was an act of statesmanship on both sides, but no one was happy with it. To the public, it suggested that Afghan democracy was a back-room deal brokered by \u00e9lites and foreigners.<\/p>\n

Ghani was inaugurated on September 29, 2014. It was the first peaceful transfer of power in Afghanistan since 1901, but Ghani and his aides felt that he had been forced to become something less than Afghanistan\u2019s legitimate President.<\/p>\n

When Ghani took office, his approval rating was above eighty per cent. Eighteen months later, in March, when I met him in Kabul, it was twenty-three per cent.<\/p>\n

In our interview, I asked how \u201cFixing Failed States\u201d had guided him as President. \u201cIt\u2019s a road map for where do you begin, when you arrive, and what you do as a leader,\u201d Ghani answered. \u201cOne of the first things I did was to ask my colleagues in the cabinet to prepare hundred-day action plans.\u201d He went on, \u201cOrganizations are accumulations of historical debris. They are not consciously thought. So when you ask the Education Ministry \u2018What\u2019s your core function and who\u2019s your client?\u2019 they laugh at you. When I say that the client is the Afghan child\u2014and the Ministry is an instrument, not the goal\u2014it\u2019s greeted with shock. It\u2019s a new idea.\u201d<\/p>\n

This thought led Ghani to expound on Mountstuart Elphinstone, a nineteenth-century Scottish envoy and the author of \u201cAn Account of the Kingdom of Caubul,\u201d which described the egalitarian nature of Afghan society. From there, Ghani\u2019s mind jumped to the Iron Emir, Abdur Rahman, Amanullah\u2019s grandfather, who imported the authoritarian idea of hierarchy from his years in exile in Russia. Then, as an example of the \u201cinherited \u00e9litism\u201d that distorts Afghan politics, Ghani told the story of a young man he had named Deputy Interior Minister, who had ordered a policeman beaten for stopping his vehicle because of a violation, and was then made to apologize on national television. Finally, Ghani arrived at the reign of Amanullah: \u201cI call it the unfinished reform. A section of the \u00e9lite was reformist, and then they met popular resistance. Today, the public is unbelievably aware of the constitution, of the world, and of its aspirations. The public is reformist.\u201d<\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

Seated across from Ghani, I found it hard to follow this two-hundred-year history of Afghan \u00e9litism. In retrospect, I can see its brilliance. But it still doesn\u2019t seem like a road map for governing.<\/p>\n

It was as if, after decades of thinking and reading and writing, he had to solve all Afghanistan\u2019s problems at once. He assumed that he had a mandate from \u201csociety.\u201d The \u00e9lites were finished\u2014\u201cthey\u2019re out of touch,\u201d he said. He began to impose his vision on every corner of government. He retired more than a hundred generals who had been skimming money from troop contracts. He demanded the resignations of all governors and cabinet ministers, and announced that nobody who had served in those capacities could do so again, thereby alienating fifty or so political veterans in one blow. He fired forty high-level prosecutors who had falsified their r\u00e9sum\u00e9s. From an American-built command center in the basement of one of his palaces, Ghani held regular videoconference calls with his military commanders. He reviewed the portfolios of every international donor agency. Every Saturday, he sat at a long table in a wood-panelled room in Gul Khana Palace and chaired a committee on procurements, spending several hours reviewing contracts to make sure that they represented clean government. Ghani believed that doing such chores was the only way to solve Afghanistan\u2019s core problems.<\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

He trusted so few people that he could find nobody to hire as his spokesman, nobody to be mayor of Kabul. During cabinet meetings, some ministers felt so intimidated by Ghani that they busied themselves taking notes to impress him. Amrullah Saleh, a respected former intelligence chief, who was left out of the administration, said, \u201cThere is a silence in his cabinet, and it\u2019s a treacherous silence. Ghani is not physically alone\u2014he is intellectually alone.\u201d<\/p>\n

The public began hearing about ambitious projects. Ghani had become an authority on Afghanistan\u2019s water resources, and he announced plans for twenty-nine dams, leaving the impression that they would be finished in two years. After a conversation with Narendra Modi, the Indian Prime Minister, Ghani told aides that India\u2019s private sector would soon be investing twenty billion dollars in Afghanistan\u2014a figure that seemed to come out of nowhere. Daniel Feldman, the American Special Representative, found Ghani\u2019s ideas equally inspiring and implausible: \u201cWe\u2019d walk out of meetings and say, \u2018I\u2019m not sure what country he\u2019s talking about. It\u2019s not Afghanistan. It sounds like a canton in Switzerland.\u2019\u00a0\u201d<\/p>\n

One morning in Char Chenar Palace, Ghani met with forty-four civil servants\u2014forty men and four women\u2014in charge of planning a new municipality northeast of Kabul, a variation on a project that has enticed Afghan reformers since Amanullah. As the engineers stated their pedigrees and their areas of expertise, Ghani jotted down notes while snacking on nuts, taking particular pleasure in introducing aides who had gone to Harvard or who had been named Silicon Valley\u2019s engineer of the year. \u201cI\u2019ve read all the documents of the proposals you\u2019ve submitted,\u201d he said. \u201cLet\u2019s have a discussion of them.\u201d One by one, the engineers and city planners presented slide shows about recycling, parking garages, solar-powered buses, electronic databases for title deeds. Ghani seemed perfectly happy spending a morning hearing ideas from young technocrats. Outside the Arg, mayorless Kabul was inundated with rainwater and uncollected garbage.<\/p>\n

In \u201cFixing Failed States,\u201d the chapter on politics is titled \u201cFailed Politics\u201d\u2014Ghani\u2019s book supposes that politics is destructive. He doesn\u2019t think in terms of interests and bargains. He believes that people will act correctly once the reasonable course is shown to them (or imposed on them). After becoming President, Ghani all but ignored the traditional politics of Afghanistan\u2014tribal networks, patronage systems, strongmen.<\/p>\n

Under Karzai, politicians came to the palace with requests for money or for favors, and he heard them out. By one estimate, members of parliament stole a billion to a billion and a half dollars a year. During Ghani\u2019s first year in office, he refused to meet with favor seekers. His chief of staff, Abdul Salam Rahimi, made himself so inaccessible that the joke around Kabul was that you had to call the President to see the chief of staff. Karzai used to pay the family of a power broker named Pir Sayed Ahmed Gailani more than a hundred thousand dollars a month in \u201cexpense money\u201d to keep its support. (Karzai denies this.) Ghani cut off the family, and Gailani\u2019s sons became Ghani\u2019s enemies. Something similar happened with Abdul Rassul Sayyaf, a former mujahid and one of the most powerful men in Afghanistan. \u201cHis initial request was for key ministries and provinces, so he could give them away,\u201d one of Ghani\u2019s advisers told me. \u201cHe didn\u2019t get them. He was upset. What was more upsetting was he was no longer seen as close to power\u2014he could no longer buy people\u2019s loyalty.\u201d<\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

In Afghanistan, politics is the only path to status and power, which is why the scramble for government jobs is so fierce. Anwar ul-Haq Ahady, a banker and former Finance Minister, supported Ghani during the election. According to Ahady, Ghani promised him the Foreign Ministry, but when the time came Ghani hedged. Ahady became an opponent as well. \u201cI\u2019ve not promised any portfolio to anyone,\u201d Ghani told me. \u201cMr. Ahady, if his sense of commitment to this nation is by portfolio, then he should judge himself.\u201d<\/p>\n

Last year, the notorious police commander of Uruzgan Province, Matiullah Khan, was killed, and tribal elders came to Kabul to discuss his replacement. Ghani initially wouldn\u2019t see them, but his advisers insisted. The elders wanted the job to go to Matiullah Khan\u2019s brother. Ghani said that he would seek the best candidate, and later rejected their choice. In the following months, nearly two hundred security posts in the province fell to the Taliban as policemen changed their flags and switched sides.<\/p>\n

Ghani was capable of giving in to political reality. He allowed two strongmen to stay on\u2014Atta Mohamed Noor, the governor of Balkh Province, in the north, and Abdul Razziq, the police chief of Kandahar\u2014even though they were known for corruption and human-rights violations. They were essential partners in the fight against the Taliban, and under American pressure Ghani yielded.<\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

One of Ghani\u2019s young aides told him, \u201cPeople say you\u2019re not doing politics.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat kind of politics?\u201d Ghani asked.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou\u2019re not meeting leaders, members of parliament, mujahideen.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s by choice that I don\u2019t.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWhy?\u201d the aide asked. \u201cThese political \u00e9lites are attacking you, and you\u2019re losing political capital you need for reforms.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cIf I meet them, they will be all over me,\u201d Ghani replied. \u201cFirst, they\u2019ll ask for my fingers, then my hands, then my legs. We will engage only if the discourse changes. When the time comes, you will see me meeting with them.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ghani\u2019s intransigence aroused so much resentment that he couldn\u2019t get parliament to approve some of his key appointments. Until recent weeks, he had no intelligence chief and no confirmed Defense Minister. When he named a candidate to be the first female Supreme Court justice, parliament narrowly voted her down. Predictably, the National Unity Government failed to work. The signed agreement included no specifics on the distribution of appointments, and Abdullah and Ghani vetoed each other\u2019s choices, or one of them held the process hostage until the other gave in. Ghani\u2019s candidate for Attorney General was blocked while Abdullah\u2019s camp tried to get one of its own hired for Minister of Interior. One of Abdullah\u2019s top aides, a diplomat named Omar Samad, was appointed Ambassador to Belgium, the E.U., and nato<\/small>. In April, Samad was about to travel to Brussels when the President\u2019s office sent him a letter withdrawing nato<\/small> from the portfolio. Samad rejected the deal and left Kabul to be with his family in Washington. \u201cTiny power struggles are going on,\u201d Samad told me. \u201cIt\u2019s a game of domination.\u201d<\/p>\n

The paralysis in Kabul so concerned Washington that President Barack Obama chided both leaders in a videoconference call in March, telling Abdullah, \u201cThe political agreement that you signed with President Ghani, as far as we know, did not give you veto power.\u201d The Attorney General\u2013Interior Minister swap finally went through. But Ghani\u2019s advisers remained frustrated, blaming the N.U.G. for their inability to carry out their agenda. It\u2019s a view that commands little sympathy in Washington.<\/p>\n

Ghani retains the loyalty of a few prot\u00e9g\u00e9s, among them a man in his early thirties named Hamdullah Mohib. His parents had sent him to Britain in 2000, at the age of sixteen, in order to avoid conscription by the Taliban. Arriving at Heathrow without papers or money, he was taken on by a social-services agency as an unaccompanied minor. Alone in London, Mohib worked his way through college and graduate school, studying computer engineering. In 2008, he heard about a lecture at the London School of Economics by an Afghan politician who had written a book called \u201cFixing Failed States.\u201d Mohib arranged to have the author speak to an Afghan student association in London. As Mohib and his friends waited for their guest to arrive, they went outside to hold parking places for the twenty-five-car entourage they expected. \u201cI saw a man carrying his laptop bag, walking up the sidewalk,\u201d Mohib recalls. \u201cI was impressed. And then when he started talking\u2014I\u2019d never heard an Afghan politician talk like this. The others\u2014it was all a show. And here was a man, it was all substance. He didn\u2019t talk about himself. It was about Afghanistan and what we could do to fix it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Mohib worked on Ghani\u2019s unsuccessful 2009 campaign, and in 2014 he became a top adviser. After the election, Ghani made Mohib his deputy chief of staff, then named him Afghanistan\u2019s Ambassador to the United States. The appointment rankled senior politicians, as if Ghani had given the post to an errand boy. Ghani was signalling the eclipse of the generation of Afghans who had made their names fighting the Soviets and one another.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis is the critical time in our country\u2019s history\u2014my generation understands that,\u201d Mohib said. \u201cWe either build systems and institutions that will protect my family and other people\u2019s families, and good people will rise to the top\u2014or we will lose, and the corrupt mafia win. If they win, it will be fiefdoms and the same families passing power from one generation to the next.<\/p>\n

One night, I had dinner in Kot-e-Baghcha Palace with Scott Guggenheim, the American economic adviser to Ghani. He worked with Ghani at the World Bank and, in 2002, helped create the National Solidarity Program. Guggenheim, a gregarious sixty-year-old who favors Indonesian shirts, was now living virtually alone, amid servants, in the palace. Heads of state had been invited to use it as a guest house, but almost none of them would stay overnight in Kabul. Guggenheim was given the room where, in 1979, a Communist leader was said to have been smothered in his bed.<\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

Over dinner, Guggenheim said, \u201cAshraf\u2019s biggest problem is not that he\u2019s a bad politician but that he has a twenty-five-year vision and everyone thinks it means next year. He throws out completely unrealistic dates as placeholders.\u201d Guggenheim described the terrible hand that had been dealt to Ghani, who took office amid the withdrawal of nearly all foreign troops. Afghanistan\u2019s legal economy depended on U.S. bases and contracts, and after the withdrawal unemployment reached forty per cent\u2014a disaster that the World Bank underestimated so drastically that donors hadn\u2019t earmarked money for an emergency jobs program. American spending in Afghanistan went from about a hundred billion dollars in 2012 to half that last year. At the same time, the Afghan Army had to assume full responsibility for fighting a resurgent Taliban, with fewer weapons. Guggenheim compared the start of Ghani\u2019s Presidency with Obama\u2019s in 2009\u2014\u201cbut with John Boehner as his Vice-President.\u201d Hopelessness returned among Afghans, and a hundred and fifty-four thousand of them emigrated to Germany last year. Ghani chastised citizens for fleeing their country.<\/p>\n

The Americans, Guggenheim went on, wanted Ghani to pursue incompatible paths: to fight corruption while keeping the corrupt Old Guard in the fold. Few people in Kabul could say what America\u2019s policy in Afghanistan was. \u201cAsk any senior U.S. statesman: Is there any strategy at all, besides withdrawal?\u201d Guggenheim said. \u201cThey were so focussed on that unity government, getting it to hold together, they forgot about having an effective government.\u201d<\/p>\n

Around Kabul, people were waiting to see if the government would fall. Peace talks that Ghani had initiated with Pakistan were going nowhere. Afghanistan\u2019s double-dealing neighbor had been unable, or unwilling, to bring the Taliban to the table. Why would Pakistan negotiate an end to the war when it was close to securing its goal\u2014an Afghanistan so weakened by the Taliban that it would become a client state? The fighting season was expected to be worse than ever. A Western diplomat took out a map and showed me Taliban positions north of Kabul, along a strategic highway in Baghlan Province. \u201cIf Baghlan falls to the Taliban, they\u2019re very quickly on their way to Kabul,\u201d the diplomat said. The Afghan Army would concentrate its forces on defending provincial capitals while ceding rural areas, but this meant that the government would keep losing ground. At the American Embassy, officials were said to be reading cables sent from the Embassy in Saigon in 1975, just before the American evacuation of South Vietnam.<\/p>\n

The Afghan Army is constantly on the defensive, suffering heavy casualties. Without the continued presence of American troops in the country, it would very likely collapse. In a return to \u201cthe Great Game\u201d of the nineteenth century, Afghanistan would be exploited by its neighbors\u2014Russia, Iran, Pakistan, China, and India. \u201cWe need what\u2019s called a \u2018hurting stalemate,\u2019\u00a0\u201d another Western official told me. \u201cBecause there are \u00e9lites in Kabul and Islamabad and Rawalpindi who shop in the same malls in Dubai and are happy for the war to grind on.\u201d He added, \u201cOver ten years, we\u2019ve gone from trying to bring good governance and security and development and rule of law to survival.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0. There\u2019s still a lot of ways the government could fall.\u201d He mentioned the possibility of widespread public unrest. Last November, after the Islamic State decapitated seven Hazara civilians in southern Afghanistan, thousands of citizens nearly overran the Arg, and some palace officials imagined themselves going the way of their predecessors.<\/p>\n

The other path for Ghani\u2019s fall is political. Recently, he has been more willing to play by the old rules\u2014for example, he named Gailani to the sinecure position of chairman of the High Peace Council. But the powerful men Ghani has angered are plotting their way back into power. The agreement signed nearly two years ago by Ghani and Abdullah called for electoral reforms, local elections, and a constitutional assembly to be completed by September of this year, in order to enshrine Abdullah\u2019s job in the constitution. None of this has happened, or will anytime soon, because of political infighting and the war\u2014giving Ghani\u2019s enemies an opening to denounce the government\u2019s legitimacy. Karzai, who meets regularly with the opposition, is said to advocate the convening of a loya jirga<\/em>, a traditional assembly, which could lead to Ghani\u2019s ouster and the naming of a new President. Umer Daudzai, Karzai\u2019s former chief of staff\u2014who had been the point man for handling cash from the Iranian regime, with a bill-counting machine in his office\u2014told me, \u201cGhani has made everybody around him an enemy. There\u2019s nobody left. One day, I was watching his wife on TV, and my wife said, \u2018Why are you watching her so closely?\u2019 I said, \u2018I\u2019m waiting for her to explode\u2014Rescue me!<\/em>\u2019\u00a0\u201d Daudzai has formed a political coalition to take over the Arg when the chance comes. \u201cIf there is going to be change, there is only one way,\u201d he said. \u201cGhani resigns.\u201d A Western official with long experience in Afghanistan told me that the notion of a junta installed by a military coup was not far-fetched.<\/p>\n

In Kabul, there is strikingly little evidence of the long and costly American effort. I asked Amrullah Saleh, the former head of intelligence, what had been achieved in Afghanistan in the past fifteen years. \u201cFrom the American point of view, very little,\u201d he said. \u201cFrom the Afghan point of view, very much. I may have a lot of personal grievances, but, if you look at the picture from a bird\u2019s eye, things have changed enormously.\u201d Saleh didn\u2019t mean roads or dams. He meant the transformation of Afghan society, of public discourse, among activists and intellectuals, women and youth. \u201cPrior to 9\/11, the biggest theme of our discussion was: How do you form a state? Today, it\u2019s not that. The biggest discourse today is how the state can deliver, how the state can survive, how Afghanistan\u2019s diversity can remain intact, and how it can be a partner with the world community.\u201d<\/p>\n

Those themes have engaged Ghani throughout his life. Although Saleh is one of his critics, he believed that Ghani could still do important things, and he did not want to see him go the way of other reformers in Afghan history. \u201cFor me, the pain is that as people see very little being delivered by this government, by this President, it will not only mean the failure of Ashraf Ghani,\u201d Saleh said. \u201cIt will also mean the failure of technocracy in Afghan politics.\u201d\u00a0\u2666<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n