According to Afghan television news station TOLO News, the Afghan embassy in Tajikistan has asked Interpol to arrest Ghani and send him back to Afghanistan to face charges of “stealing public wealth”.
The Afghan embassy in Tajikistan has asked Interpol police to detain Ashraf Ghani, Hamdallah Mohib and Fazal Mahmood Fazli on charges of stealing public wealth, so that funds could be returned to #Afghanistan, sources said.
— TOLOnews (@TOLOnews) August 18, 2021
Mohammad Zahir Aghbar, ambassador to Tajikistan, has said today that according to the Constitution, in the absence, escape or death of the president, the first vice president becomes the caretaker and Amrullah Saleh is currently the official acting president, sources said. pic.twitter.com/F3XEngNMj3
— TOLOnews (@TOLOnews) August 18, 2021
But according to a recent report from Bloomberg, Ghani’s whereabouts are now a “mystery”.
After being denounced by his central bank chief, Ghani’s public image has transformed from transnational bureaucrat and academic to “villain in hiding”.
After returning to Afghanistan for the first time in 25 years to serve in the government of his predecessor, Hamid Karzai.
After becoming a darling of the World Bank-IMF-led establishment and a long-shot candidate for head of the UN, Ghani instead was elected president of Afghanistan in 2014.
His reign was fraught from the start, as then-Secretary of State John Kerry quickly elevated one of his top political rivals. President Trump’s Administration later cut him out in favor of direct talks with the Taliban.
Now, after initially promising not to flee, Ghani has fled, and his former countrymen are demanding he be returned to face justice in Afghanistan.
Former president Karzai and other Afghan politicians are now leading talks with the Taliban in Doha on setting up a new government, and Bloomberg says “disdain for Ghani” is one of the few areas where they’re likely to agree.
“Ashraf Ghani has betrayed his own motherland, team and tribe,” Abdul Haq Hamad, a member of Taliban’s media team, told Afghanistan’s Tolo News. “Such treason will always be remembered.”
As Ghani remains in hiding, his daughter, a wealthy Brooklyn artist and academic living in a rented loft in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Clinton Hill, is living the hipster life in NYC, far removed from concerns about the Taliban erasing freedoms for women.
According to the NY Post, “Mariam Ghani, a 42-year-old visual artist and filmmaker, enjoys a bohemian lifestyle in her Brooklyn loft, where the contrast to harsh Taliban rule over women and girls couldn’t be more stark.”
Ghani refused to speak with a NY Post reporter, but published an Instagram post saying she was “angry and grieving and terribly afraid for family, friends & colleagues left behind in Afghanistan,” adding that she was “working feverishly to do anything I can on their behalf.”
View this post on Instagram
She included links for people to write to lawmakers.
Little is known about their relationship, other than that she was born in Brooklyn, and raised in suburban Maryland while her father taught at Johns Hopkins. By the time he became involved in the Afghan government, she had started her teaching career, which has included stints as a lecturer at the ultra-progressive Bennington College.
An NYT article about her work described her as a “feminist, an archivist and an activist”.
Source: ZEROHEDGE