Afghan President Ashraf Ghani Is the Partner the United States Needs to Get the Job Done - CFR

Enter Ashraf Ghani, Afghanistan’s new brainy, cheerful, Western-educated president. Born in Afghanistan, he received his PhD from Columbia University and has spent his career as a scholar and a World Bank official, focused on the problems of state building and economic development. What was he doing for these past thirteen years? In part writing Fixing Failed States, a book which has become a must-read for today’s generation of aid workers and military officers serving abroad. This he did after serving briefly as Afghanistan’s Finance Minister (2002-2004) and then co-founding with Clare Lockhart the Institute for State Effectiveness.

Listening to his many speeches and interviews in meeting after meeting during this week’s trip to DC and New York, it is clear that these decades of study and practice have prepared him superbly for this moment. He exudes confidence and brilliance, referencing a dizzying array of facts, statistics, history, and theory, as he lays out his strategy for “fixing” Afghanistan.

Of course, developing this sort of infrastructure will require a high level of security. This is one reason for Ghani’s visit to the United States, during which President Obama officially announced that U.S. force levels in Afghanistan will remain at 9,800 through the end of 2015. The Pentagon also announced plans to fund the Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF) at a level of 352,000 troops through 2017.

At every stop on his visit, Ghani—in stark contrast to former Afghan President Karzai—again and again expressed his gratitude for the hard work and sacrifice of U.S. service members.In an emotional speech at the Pentagon, he addressed a girl whose father is currently deployed to Afghanistan:  Read More at CFR

Afghan President Ashraf Ghani Is the Partner the United States Needs to Get the Job Done