Transcript of President Ghani’s Interview with a Delegation of Western Journalists and Media Opinion Leaders

President Ghani: - Kabul, Afghanistan
Every analyst predicted our collapse. From day one, we did not have a winter break, we have been fighting through the winter, and there was no winter lap. We have moved from a defensive position to a largely offensive position. In Helmand, we carried out an unprecedented operation prior to the onset of the spring. Right now, we have covered Zabul,   today we are entering the Nawa district of Ghazni, where no coalition forces had even been. So it is a systematic offensive campaign and it is yielding results. In the northeast, we are in defensive position, so let’s look at the drivers. First, Pakistan’s operation in north and south Waziristan had a major displacement effect, the old order of terrorists incorporated and relocated its center of gravity to Afghanistan and these are people whose activities cannot be framed within a national political framework. They are international by definition but they thought and they had been planning for it for a long time to relocate. Our offensive operations against them have enabled us to move. That is one driver, the second driver is the criminal economy which Mr. Lenchov covered so well. Criminality requires ungoverned space, it requires disorder. The global heroin trade is a network – producer, processor, transiter, consumer. Unless there is coordinated action on all four parts of this chain plus an incredibly flexible global financing movement, the deregulation of the global financial market has brought about movement of money. So that is, this criminality is a driver. The third driver is the emergence of Daesh which has four phases - organize, operate, decide and act. But their patterns are very different than Alqaeda incorporated because terrorism is fast transforming itself, it is morphing. I called it with a new term in Munich; I call it the ecology of terror. We operate within an ecology of terror. As each state system weakens or collapses, the pressure increases. Because then there is a narrative of success, the fourth driver are of course the Taliban, and their mode of conduct. And the fifth driver is irresponsible armed groups, the tie to the criminal economy, where have we suffered in terms of casualties?  -  Read More at Ghani’s Interview with a Delegation of Western Journalists

Transcript of President Ghani’s Interview with a Delegation of Western Journalists and Media Opinion Leaders 

President Ghani Meets Pakistan Former President Asif Ali Zardari