They claim that Ashraf Ghani won his election mainly because of massive electoral fraud.
Washington:
Afghanistan’s former president Ashraf Ghani, who fled the country after the Taliban seized power in Kabul, was a “complete fraud” who was completely focused on his desire to remain in power and would not participate in any peace talks. were a major obstacle, former US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has said.
In his book titled ‘Never Give An Inch: Fighting for the America I Love’, Pompeo claims that both Ghani and former Afghanistan chief executive Abdullah Abdullah were involved in corruption at the highest level that helped lead to America’s successful exit from the war. Capacity was limited – A torn country in August 2021.
The United States completed its withdrawal from Afghanistan on 31 August, ending its 20-year-old military presence in the country.
“With speed of conversation, Ghani was always a problem. I met a lot of world leaders, and he was my least favorite. That’s saying a lot when you have Kim (Jong-un), Xi (Jinping) and (Vladimir) Putin.” mix. Yet Ghani was an outright fraud who ruined American lives and focused solely on his desire to remain in power,” Pompeo wrote in his book, which hit bookstores this week. .
In the book, he wrote, “I never felt that he was prepared to take a risk for his country that could jeopardize his power. It disgusted me.” President Donald Trump did with the Taliban group.
The Trump administration appointed former diplomat Zalmay Khalilzad as special envoy for talks with the Taliban.
Pompeo claims that Ghani won his election primarily because of massive election fraud.
“According to the last nominal count, Ghani had defeated Abdullah Abdullah, the country’s chief executive. But the truth was that Ghani had bribed more voters and vote counters than any of the other candidates,” writes the former secretary of state.
Pompeo says that both Ghani and Abdullah were fighting regardless of who would be the next president, whether Afghanistan would have a government to lead or not.
“At the request of General Miller, I flew on a plane to Afghanistan on March 23, 2020 to tell him that he needed to find housing, or I would advise President Trump that we should be out of the country immediately, Mote At that time, we were giving US $ 5-6 billion in foreign aid, starting with elimination as a whole.
It was a real threat, Pompeo said.
“While the public’s focus was almost always on how the aid provided security support, its larger purpose was to maintain civil order. It funded schools and health care, but it also meant a ‘wealth of money’ for local leaders. It’s also a euphemism for bribery. , and it’s the sad reality of how both American aid and Afghan society work,” he said.
“My message got their attention. Eventually, we stopped $1 billion in aid to show we weren’t bluffing. In May, Abdullah essentially gave control to Ghani, and we had At least, a head of the Afghan government was.” They said.
After joining the Trump administration, Pompeo said, he assessed that Afghan low-level corruption achieved a measure of stability, as it prevented the country from fully reconciling, even if the government’s relationship with its people At a staggering cost for reliability.
Pompeo said, “The fact was that even Afghanistan’s President Ashraf Ghani and the country’s chief executive, Abdullah Abdullah, both led cartels that stole millions of dollars in aid from the United States. At the highest level Corruption limited our ability to exit successfully.”
Ghani, for all his eloquence and charm, was not the leader of a war-torn, deeply divided tribal nation that wanted to build the necessary political institutions, he said.
“He was a dim bulb in his political instincts and a Brussels-style manager in a cauldron of violence that demanded a last-fight championship mentality. Nor did he have much credibility among Afghan leaders, nearly all of whom were at war. or another for their entire adult lives,” Pompeo said.
They claim that Ghani’s years in the West had made him adept at gambiting US lawmakers and non-profit organizations.
“He also spent wildly on lobbyists. I say without exaggeration that Ghani had more friends in the District of Columbia than in Afghanistan. When I first met him during my CIA days, I told him straight : ‘AAP’ wasting your time on K Street and Capitol Hill while you should be running for allies in Herat and Mazar-i-Sharif.’
Ghani, who has been living in exile in the United Arab Emirates since the Taliban captured Afghanistan’s capital Kabul on August 15, 2021, has, in the past, strongly defended his move to flee the war-torn country, saying he wanted to left to stay. “Bloodshed” by the Taliban.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
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