Washington:
Ashraf Ghani, the former president of Afghanistan who fled the country when the Taliban seized power in Kabul, was “a total con artist” focused solely on his own desire to stay in power and a major hurdle in peace talks, the former said. US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has said.
In his book titled “Never Give an Inch: Fighting for the America I Love,” Pompeo alleges that both Ghani and former President of Afghanistan, Abdullah Abdullah, were involved in top-level corruption that undermined the U.S.’s ability to to successfully exit the war was limited. torn country in August 2021.
The United States completed its withdrawal from Afghanistan on August 31, ending its 20-year military presence in the country.
“As negotiations accelerated, Ghani was always a problem. I met many world leaders and he was my least favorite. That says a lot when you include Kim (Jong-un), Xi (Jinping) and (Vladimir) Putin in the group Yet Ghani was a total con artist who had wasted American lives and focused solely on his own desire to stay in power,” Pompeo writes in his book, which hit bookstores this week.
“Never did I feel he was willing to take a risk for his country that might jeopardize his power. This disgusted me,” he writes in the book, which details the negotiations led by the previous US administration. ex-President Donald Trump had with the Taliban group.
The Trump administration had appointed former diplomat Zalmay Khalilzad as a special envoy for talks with the Taliban.
Pompeo claims that Ghani won his re-election mainly because of massive electoral fraud.
“According to the final nominal count, Ghani had beaten the country’s president, Abdullah Abdullah. But the truth was that Ghani simply bribed more voters and tellers than the other candidates,” the former secretary of state writes.
Pompeo says both Ghani and Abdullah were fighting over who would be the next president, without regard to whether there would even be a government to lead in Afghanistan.
“At General Miller’s request, on March 23, 2020, I boarded a plane to Afghanistan to tell them to find shelter or else I would advise President Trump to leave the country immediately, starting with the elimination of the approximately $5 -6 billion a year in foreign aid that we provided at the time,” he said.
This was a real threat, Pompeo notes.
“While the public’s attention has almost always been on how the aid provided security assistance, its larger purpose was to maintain civil order. It funded schools and health care, but it also meant ‘walking around with money’ for local leaders. That’s a euphemism for bribery, and it is the sad reality of both American aid and Afghan society,” he said.
“My message caught their attention. We ended up cutting $1 billion in aid to show we weren’t bluffing. In May, Abdullah essentially handed control over to Ghani, and at least we had a head of the Afghan government. ” he said.
After joining the Trump administration, Pompeo said, he judged Afghanistan’s low-level corruption provided a degree of stability as it kept the country from falling apart completely, albeit at a staggering cost to the credibility of the government. the government with its own people.
“The fact was that even Afghan President Ashraf Ghani and the country’s president, Abdullah Abdullah, both ran cartels that stole millions of dollars in aid from the United States. That top-level corruption limited our ability to successfully exit,” he said. Pompeo.
For all his eloquence and charm, Ghani was not the leader of a war-torn, deeply divided tribal nation seeking to build the necessary political institutions, he said.
“He was a wimp in his political instincts and a Brussels-style manager in a cauldron of violence that required an Ultimate Fighting Championship mentality. Nor did he have much credibility among the Afghan leadership, almost all of whom had fought in one war or war .” another for their entire adult lives,” Pompeo said.
Ghani’s years in the West had made him a master at playing US legislators and nonprofits, he claims.
“He also spent extravagantly on lobbyists. It’s no exaggeration to say that Ghani had more friends in the District of Columbia than in Afghanistan. When I first met him during my CIA days, I flat out told him, ‘You’re wasting your time on K Street and Capitol Hill, while you should look for allies in Herat and Mazar-e-Sharif,” Pompeo wrote.
Ghani, who has been living in exile in the UAE since the Taliban took over the Afghan capital Kabul on August 15, 2021, has in the past vehemently defended his move to flee the war-torn country, saying he left to stop further. “bloodshed” by the Taliban.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by DailyExpertNews staff and is being published from a syndicated feed.)
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