Ashraf Ghani Ahmadzai - Recent Years

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 NewsHour 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.

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.