Ashraf Ghani

Mohammad Ashraf Ghani Ahmadzai (born 19 May 1949) is an Afghan politician, anthropologist and economist who served as president of Afghanistan from 29 September 2014 until 15 August 2021, when he left the country as the Taliban took Kabul. Before that he was the World Bank's lead anthropologist, finance minister of Afghanistan (2002–2004) and chancellor of Kabul University (2004–2008). ^{1 2}

Ghani was born in Logar Province, of the Ahmadzai Pashtun tribe, and attended secondary school in Kabul, spending the 1966–1967 school year as an exchange student in Oregon. He took a bachelor's degree at the American University of Beirut in 1973, taught at Kabul University and at Aarhus, and completed a master's degree (1977) and a doctorate (1983) in cultural anthropology at Columbia University. He then taught at Berkeley and at Johns Hopkins, and in 1991 joined the World Bank, becoming its lead anthropologist. ¹

Ghani returned to Afghanistan in December 2001 after twenty-four years abroad, advised the interim administration, and became finance minister on 2 June 2002, carrying out extensive reforms of currency, treasury and revenue. In December 2004 he declined a cabinet post and instead became chancellor of Kabul University, serving until 2008; with Clare Lockhart he co-founded the Institute for State Effectiveness and co-authored Fixing Failed States (2008). He stood in the 2009 presidential election and placed fourth, with roughly three per cent of the vote. ^{1 3}

Ghani won the disputed presidential election of 2014 after a United States-mediated national-unity agreement with his rival Abdullah Abdullah, who became chief executive; he was re-elected after the delayed count of the 2019 election. As president he was known for energetic, technocratic ambitions, and the English article records that many of his promises — fighting corruption and turning the country into a trade hub — were left unfulfilled, and that he was criticised as aloof, including during the Taliban offensive of 2021. ¹

On 15 August 2021, as the Taliban entered Kabul, Ghani left Afghanistan with his wife and two close aides; the United Arab Emirates confirmed on 18 August that it was hosting him and his family on humanitarian grounds. Ghani stated that he left to avoid bloodshed and to avoid being hanged, and vowed eventually to return. The English article records that he was condemned across various spectrums for abandoning Afghanistan to the Taliban, was criticised by Afghan politicians including Ahmad Massoud for handing the country over, and was accused of corruption during his administration; these are carried here as the article's attributed statements, not as findings. ¹

The English article carries no religion content at all, and the Arabic and Urdu articles give his religion only generically, as Islam, in their infoboxes, with no school named in any text. Generic Islam does not attest a school, and a president's policies are state policy. Under the museum's two-source rule his faith is recorded as unknown. ^{1 3 2}

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