Ashraf Ghani

Dr. Ashraf Ghani Ahmadzai or Ashraf Ghani is the Chairman of the Institute of State Effectiveness, an organization set up in January 2005 to promote the ability of states to serve their citizens. As Afghanistan's finance minister between July 2002 and December 2004, he set the path for Afghanistan's attempted economic recovery after the collapse of the Taliban.

Commonly he is shortly referred to as Ahsraf Ghani, since there is also another Afghan politician named Mohammad Sarwar Ahmadzai, who was also a candidate in the Afghan presidential election, 2009.

Dr. Ghani is also a member of the Commission on Legal Empowerment of the Poor, an independent initiative hosted by the UNDP. He is currently the third in polls, behind the present president Hamid Karzai and his main contender Dr. Abdullah Abdullah.

Early years

Ashraf Ghani, an ethnic Pashtun, was born in 1949 in the Logar province of Afghanistan. He has studied political science and international affairs at the American University of Beirut. He later attended Columbia University. At Columbia, he earned his Master's and PhD in Anthropology. He has also attended the Harvard-INSEAD and Stanford business schools leadership training program for the World Bank. He served on the faculty of Kabul University (1973-77), Aarhus University in Denmark (1977), University of California, Berkeley (1983), and Johns Hopkins University (1983-1991). His academic research was on state-building and social transformations. In 1985 he undertook a year of fieldwork researching Pakistani Madrasas as a Fulbright Scholar. He has also studied comparative religion. He joined the World Bank in 1991, working on projects in East Asia and South Asia until the mid 1990s. In 1996, he pioneered the application of institutional and organizational analysis to macro processes of change and reform, working directly on the adjustment program of the Russian coal industry and carrying out reviews of the Bank’s country assistance strategies and structural adjustment programs globally. He spent five years each in China, India, and Russia managing large-scale development and institutional transformation projects. He had worked intensively with the media during the first Gulf War, commenting on major radio and television programs and being interviewed by newspapers.

Recent years

After 9/11, he took leave without pay from the World Bank and engaged in intensive interaction with the media, appearing regularly on PBS’s News Hour as well as BBC, CNN, other television programs, the BBC, Public Radio, other radios, and writing for major newspapers. In November 2002, he accepted an appointment as a Special Advisor to the United Nations and assisted Mr. Lakhdar Brahimi, the Special Representative of the Secretary General to Afghanistan, to prepare the Bonn Agreement, the process and document that provided the basis of transfer of power to the people of Afghanistan.

Returning after 24 years to Afghanistan in December 2001, he resigned from his posts at the UN and World Bank to join the Afghan government as the chief advisor to President Hamid Karzai on February 1, 2002. He has worked on a pro bono basis and was among the first officials to disclose his assets. In this capacity, he worked on the preparation of the Loya Jirgas (grand assemblies) that elected President Hamid Karzai and approved the Constitution of Afghanistan. After the election of President Karzai directly by the people of Afghanistan in October 2004, Mr. Ghani declined to join the cabinet and asked to be appointed as Chancellor of Kabul University. As Chancellor of the University, he worked to institute a style of participatory governance among the faculty, students, and staff, advocating a vision of the university where men and women with skills and commitment to lead their country in the age of globalization can be trained.

Since leaving the university, Dr. Ghani has co-founded the Institute for State Effectiveness, of which he is Chairman. The Institute has put forward a framework which proposes that the state should perform ten functions in the contemporary world in order to serve its citizens. This framework was discussed by leaders and managers of post-conflict transitions at a meeting sponsored by the UN and World Bank at the Greentree Estates in September 2005. The program also proposes that the vehicle of state-building or sovereignty strategies, underpinned by double compacts between the international community, government and the population of a country could be used as a basis for organizing aid and other interventions, and that a sovereignty index to measure state effectiveness should be compiled on an annual basis.

Mr. Ghani was tipped as a candidate to succeed Kofi Annan as Secretary General of the United Nations at the end of 2006. His name was floated in a front page report in The Financial Times (September 18, 2006) which went on to quote him as saying, “I hope to win, through ideas.” Two distinguished experts on international relations told the paper that "the UN would be very lucky indeed to have him" and praised his "tremendous intellect, talent and capacity."

Doubts about his temperament seemed to be haunting him a few months later, in April 2007, when his name appeared as a possible candidate to head the World Bank.

Mr. Ghani has been sought as a public speaker and in 2005 given the keynote speeches for a number of meetings including the American Bar Association’s International Rule of Law Symposium, the Trans-Atlantic Policy Network, the annual meeting of the Norwegian Government’s development staff, CSIS’ meeting on UN reform, the UN-OECD-World Bank’s meeting on Fragile States, and TEDGlobal. He has contributed to the Financial Times, International Herald Tribune, Los Angeles Times, New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post.

Role in post-Taliban Afghanistan

Ashraf Ghani was recognized as the best finance minister of Asia in 2003 by Emerging Markets. During his tenure as finance minister of Afghanistan, he carried out a series of extensive reforms. He issued a new currency in record time, computerized the operations of the treasury, instituted the single treasury account, adopted a policy of no-deficit financing, introduced the budget as the central instrument of policy, centralized revenue, reformed the tariff system, and overhauled customs. He instituted regular reporting to the cabinet, the people of Afghanistan, and international stakeholders as a tool of transparency and accountability, and broke new ground in the coordination of donor assistance by requiring donors to keep their interventions to three sectors, thereby bringing clarity and mutual accountability to their relations with government counterparts, and preparing a development strategy that held Afghans more accountable for their own future development.

Dr. Ashraf Ghani with United States Secretary of the Treasury John Snow in 2004.

On March 31, 2004, he presented a seven-year program of public investment called Securing Afghanistan’s Future to an international conference in Berlin attended by 65 finance and foreign ministers. Described as the most comprehensive program ever prepared and presented by a poor country to the international community, Securing Afghanistan’s Future was prepared by a team of 100 experts working under the supervision of a committee chaired by Mr. Ghani. The concept of a double-compact, between the donors and the government of Afghanistan on the one hand and between the government and people of Afghanistan on the other, underpinned the program of investment in Securing Afghanistan’s Future. The donors pledged $8.2 billion at the conference for the first three years of the program –- the exact amount asked by the government -- and agreed that the government’s request for a total seven-year package of assistance of $27.5 billion was justified.

The focus on poverty eradication through the creation of wealth and the establishment of the rights of citizenship has been at the heart of Mr. Ghani’s development approach. In Afghanistan, he is attributed with designing the National Solidarity Program, a program of bloc grants to villages in which elected village councils determine both the priorities and the mechanisms of implementation. The program currently covers 13,000 of the estimated 20,000 villages of the country. He also partnered with the Ministry of Communication to ensure that telecom licenses were granted on a fully-transparent basis. As a result, the number of mobile phones in the country has jumped from 100 in July 2002 to over a million at the end of 2005. Private investment in the sector exceeded $200 million and the telecom sector emerged as one of the major sectors of revenue generation for government.

Afghan presidential election, 2009

In January 2009 an article by Ahmad Majidyar of the American Enterprise Institute included Ghani on a list of fifteen possible candidates in the 2009 Afghan Presidential election. On May 7, 2009, Ashraf Ghani registered as a candidate in the Afghan presidential election, 2009. In announcing his candidacy, Ghani emphasized the importance of: establishing a representative administration; good governance; building a dynamic economy and creating employment opportunities for the Afghan people. Unlike other major candidates, Ghani is specifically reaching out the Afghan diaspora to support his campaign and provide financial support. He has appointed Mohammed Ayub Rafiqi as one of his vice president candidate deputies, and hired noted Clinton-campaign chief strategist James Carville as a campaign advisor.

Preliminary results placed Ghani fourth in a field of 38.

Quote

During the Afghan presidential election in 2009, Ashraf Ghani declared on talking with the voters during his campaign

"It has been the largest seminar in my life, and I have been the sole student."

See also

• Politics of Afghanistan
• Economy of Afghanistan

External links

• Presidential Campaign Website
• Afghan Elections Dossier - Ashraf Ghani, August 2009 - Radio France Internationale
• Financial Contributions to Ashraf Ghani's campaign
• The Institute for State Effectiveness
• Video of Ghani's presentation about mobilizing capital for state-building. (Recorded at the TED Conference July 2005 in Oxford, UK. Duration: 19:24)
• Authors@Google: Ashraf Ghani & Claire Lockhart A talk in Google New York office, June 20, 2008 (Duration: 1 hr)
• TED Talks: Ashraf Ghani on rebuilding broken states at TED Global in 2005
• http://afghanmirror.tripod.com/id27.html