New Delhi: Denying accusations of that he left the country with a large amount of money, President Afghanistan Ashraf Ghani, in a Facebook video message shared on Wednesday, called it a “baseless lie.”
Ghani mysteriously fled to United Arab Emirates after Taliban militants retook Afghanistan’s capital, almost two decades, last Sunday. On Wednesday, the United Arab Emirates government said in a statement that he is in the country from where he posted the message on social media.
In the video, he reiterated that he left the country to avoid bloodshed. “I also wanted to prevent Afghanistan from becoming like Syria and Yemen, and avert dreadful disaster of ‘being hanged’ had he remained in office. I had the country with any money,” he said in the video.
Ghani served as President of Afghanistan between September 2014 and August 2021. On 15 August 2021, the Taliban took control of Afghanistan and he fled the country to the United Arab Emirates. Ghani was first elected on 20 September 2014 and was re-elected on 28 September in the 2019 presidential election. He was announced the winner after a protracted process in February 2020 and was sworn in for a second term on 9 March 2020. An anthropologist by education, he previously served as Minister of Finance and the Chancellor of Kabul University.
Before returning to Afghanistan in 2002, Ghani was a professor of anthropology at numerous institutions (mostly Johns Hopkins University), and later started working with the World Bank. As the Finance Minister of Afghanistan between July 2002 and December 2004, he led Afghanistan’s attempted economic recovery after the collapse of the Taliban government.
He is the co-founder of the Institute for State Effectiveness, an organization set up in 2005 to improve the ability of states to serve their citizens. In 2005 he gave a TED talk, in which he discussed how to rebuild a broken state such as Afghanistan.
He is a member of the Commission on Legal Empowerment of the Poor, an independent initiative hosted by the United Nations Development Programme. In 2013 he was ranked 50th in an online poll to name the world’s top 100 intellectuals conducted by Foreign Policy magazine and second in a similar poll run by Prospect magazine.