BBC interview
Ex-President Ashraf Ghani defends escape from Afghanistan
“It was all really suddenly”: Ashraf Ghani. Photo: Rahmat Gul / AP / dpa
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Afghanistan’s ex-president Ashraf Ghani is the first to provide details about his escape from Afghanistan. On the morning of the day Kabul fell, he did not know that he would leave the country.
The Afghan ex-president Ashraf Ghani justified himself for his escape from the country in mid-August. This was not planned and he did this to prevent bloodshed and the destruction of Kabul.
“On the morning of that day, I had no idea that I would be leaving in the late afternoon,” he told BBC Radio 4 in a published interview.
The chief of the presidential guard and the national security advisor Hamdullah Mohib informed him at the time that the presidential guard had collapsed. Should he resist, everyone would be killed and no one could defend him.
Mohib was really scared and didn’t give him more than two minutes. The previous instructions were to prepare for a departure to the eastern Afghan city of Khost. Mohib then told him that Khost had fallen, and so did Jalalabad. He did not know where they were going. It was only when they took off that it became clear that they were leaving the country. “It was all really sudden.”
Ghani fled Kabul abroad on August 15 after Taliban fighters surrounded Kabul following massive military territorial gains and the conquest of all provincial capitals. Taliban officials said it was not their intention to attack the city. Ghani told BBC Radio 4 that his key security advisers had told him the Taliban had broken their promise not to enter Kabul.
Ghani’s flight had probably prevented an orderly transfer of power. When he fled, the Islamists moved into the city so they said they would not create a security vacuum. Many Afghans today accuse Ghani of extraditing them to the Taliban.
Ghani also told BBC Radio 4 that he was being made the “scapegoat” for the current crisis and chaos in Afghanistan. He admitted guilt for having made the “big mistake” of trusting international partners who had put him under constant pressure and curtailed his authority.
The former Afghan Foreign Minister Rangin Dadfar Spanta has a somewhat different view. According to him, the takeover of power by the Taliban did not come as a surprise to Kabul, but had been prepared for a long time. Months before, it had been rehearsed how to evacuate the president, his wife and close associates. “These were all tried and tested things, it wasn’t that the president left the palace in a rush,” said the political scientist, who now lives in Aachen, on Deutschlandfunk on Thursday.
Many politicians and observers in Kabul would have known that a collapse of the government and the republic was imminent. “It had been prepared for a long time by the president and his team, and above all by the negotiating team between the United States of America and the Taliban,” said Spanta, who was foreign minister from 2006 to 2010. “But we didn’t expect that everything would suddenly start in such a rush.”