Mohammad Ashraf Ghani – Elected President of Afghanistan

Mohammad Ashraf Ghani is the current President of Afghanistan, elected on 21 September 2014.

Initial results from the run-off elections showed Ghani as the overwhelming favourite to win the elections. However, allegations of electoral fraud resulted in a stalemate, threats of violence and the formation of a parallel government by his opponent Dr. Abdullah Abdullah camp. On 7 August 2014 US Secretary of State John Kerry flew to Kabul to broker a deal that outlined an extensive audit of nearly 8 million votes and formation of a national unity government with a new role for a chief executive who would serve as a prime-minister. After a three month audit process, which was supervised by the United Nations with financial support from the U.S. government, the Independent Election Commission announced Ghani as the President of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan after Ghani agreed to a national unity deal. Initially the election commission said it would not formally announce specific results, it later released a statement that said Ghani managed to secure 55.4% and Abdullah Abdullah secured 43.5% of the vote. Although it declined to release the individual vote results.

An anthropologist by education, he previously served as Finance Minister and the chancellor of Kabul University. Before returning to Afghanistan in 2002, President Ghani worked with the World Bank. As the Finance Minister of Afghanistan between July 2002 and December 2004, he led Afghanistan’s attempted economic recovery after the collapse of the Taliban government.

He is the co-founder of the Institute for State Effectiveness, an organization set up in 2005 to improve the ability of states to serve their citizens. In 2005 he gave a TED talk, in which he discussed how to rebuild a broken state such as Afghanistan.^[1] President Ghani is a member of the Commission on Legal Empowerment of the Poor, an independent initiative hosted by the United Nations Development Programme. In 2013 he was ranked second in an online poll to name the world’s top 100 intellectuals conducted by Foreign Policy and Prospect magazines