Technocrat to Populist, an Afghan Transformed --- KABUL, Afghanistan — When dealing with Western officials, Ashraf Ghani presents himself as the rare technocrat who possesses both the cultural savvy and practical expertise needed to put Afghanistan back on track if he is elected president in the runoff vote on Saturday. -- After all, as Mr. Ghani readily reminds people, he has written a book titled “Fixing Failed States.” -- But Afghan voters are less impressed by a doctorate from Columbia University, a 15-year stint at the World Bank and a penchant for conducting small talk in a vernacular best described as technocratese (think phrases like “consultative processes” and “cooperative frameworks”). The winners here are populists who cut deals with their enemies, win support from their rivals and appeal to Afghan national pride — a reality that Mr. Ghani appears to have finally embraced after years of inhabiting the role of pro-Western intellectual. -- Especially when addressing his fellow ethnic Pashtuns, Mr. Ghani, a former finance minister, has leavened his usual talk of detailed economic plans with statements about Afghans’ will to resist all who seek to oppress them, from Pakistan to the Taliban to the United States. --- At one rally in Kandahar, the heart of the Pashtun south and the city where the Taliban group was founded, he boasted about his role in securing the release of hundreds of insurgent suspects from what had been the main American prison in Afghanistan. The move infuriated American officials, but Mr. Ghani promised that it was just the beginning. -- “We will release more prisoners,” he said. “We will not allow prisoners to be used as a business commodity,” he added, in an apparent reference to negotiations with the United States over their fate. -- The transformation of Mr. Ghani into something akin to an Afghan populist is perhaps the most surprising story line in the Afghan presidential campaign, and he is heading into the runoff this weekend in what some observers believe is a dead heat with his rival, Abdullah Abdullah. -- “He’s thought deeply about what kind of presidency he would like to create,” said Clare Lockhart, a former colleague of Mr. Ghani’s who helped him write the book on failed states. “In general, his commitment is to have a much more shared sense of governance.” -- A year ago, it was hard to imagine that Mr. Ghani would make it this far. He won a mere 2.9 percent of the vote during his first run at the presidency, in 2009, and before the recent campaign, many here gave him long odds of doing much better this year. --- Common themes emerged in interviews with Afghans at the time: Mr. Ghani was widely described as being too focused on policy problems and lacking a natural constituency or a common touch. Many described his temper as both short and hot, and his outbursts had alienated many powerful people during his stints as finance minister and, more recently, as President Hamid Karzai’s lead adviser on the transition of security responsibility to Afghan forces from the Americans. -- Even his supporters acknowledge that he can be difficult, though some try to spin his off-putting side as a positive. “He can be disempowering because he can be so smart,” said one close associate who spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid angering Mr. Ghani. --- Foreign diplomats joked that Mr. Ghani would win if the only voters were foreign diplomats. And yet they, too, complained about what they described as his curt manner and unwillingness to compromise on issues that he believes he knows better than others. -- “He’s been more than willing to give us the back of his hand,” was how one American diplomat recently put it. --- To that, Mr. Ghani said he did so only when he had good reason. He knows the West too well to let American and European officials dictate how Afghanistan should be run, he said in an interview. --- The son of an official in the government of Afghanistan’s last king, Zahir Shah, Mr. Ghani, 65, was first introduced to the United States as a high school exchange student in Oregon. There, he also got his first taste of democracy. “There was a student council, and it had money and decision-making power!” he recalled. -- He later attended the American University of Beirut, where he met his future wife, Rula, a Lebanese Christian, before earning a doctorate in anthropology and international studies from Columbia. -- He eventually took a senior role at the World Bank, settling in the Washington area and becoming an American citizen in 1990. (He gave up his United States passport in 2009 to run for president.) --- He returned to Afghanistan in December 2001 and soon became the finance minister in Mr. Karzai’s new government. In the next years, he managed a huge influx of aid, winning praise from Western officials for doing so without bringing on high inflation. He also devised a large-scale antipoverty program and helped restore a single currency in Afghanistan, where warlords had printed their own bills during the civil war and the Taliban era. --- A security deal needs to be signed with the United States, and “the economy is imploding,” Mr. Ghani said. “The cost of corruption for the public has been estimated to be at least twice that of national revenue.” -- It is “not a moment for modest aims,” he said, adding, “I have the experience, I have the vision and I have the credibility.” - More, MATTHEW ROSENBERG, NYTimes, http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/12/world/asia/technocrat-to-populist-an-afghan-transformed.html?ref=world&_r=0