It had been rehearsed months before how to evacuate the president, his wife and close colleagues. “These were all tried and tested things, it wasn’t that the president left the palace in a rush,” said the ex-minister on Thursday on Deutschlandfunk.
Many politicians and observers in Kabul would have known that a collapse of the government and the republic was imminent. “That had been prepared a long time ago by the president and his team and, above all, by the negotiating team between the United States of America and the Taliban,” said the political scientist Spanta, who now lives in Aachen. ”
The only surprise was that everything happened so suddenly at once – “we hadn’t expected that.”
Spanta was Afghanistan’s Foreign Minister from 2006 to 2010. He defended the withdrawal of international troops, but not the type of withdrawal. “Nobody in Afghanistan wanted the international troops to continue to be present in Afghanistan,” he said. “But the withdrawal should be done responsibly. And not like this without involving the Afghans, without bringing about a transfer of power or without peace negotiations. ” In addition, “the governments, which were massively supported by some Western countries in their election fraud”, had prepared their escape for a long time.
Spanta himself managed to escape from Kabul with Turkish help in mid-August. His house was searched by the Taliban shortly after he made his way to the airport. “If I had a slim chance of survival, I would have stayed in Afghanistan,” he said.
When asked whether the claim of the western states to create a democracy in Afghanistan had been a mistake, Spanta said: “Democracy is not a project that is packaged in other countries and then transferred.” That is a process and cannot be realized in a country that has been at war for 20 years.
The Afghan ex-president has a completely different view Ashraf Ghani That is how he – also on Thursday, in an interview with BBC Radio 4 – defended his escape from the country in mid-August. This was not planned and he did this to prevent bloodshed in the city. “On the morning of that day, I had no idea that I would be leaving in the late afternoon.”
The chief of the presidential guard and the national security advisor Hamdullah Mohib informed him at the time that the presidential guard had collapsed. Should he resist, everyone would be killed and no one could defend him. The instructions were to prepare for a departure to the eastern Afghan city of Khost. Mohib then told him that Chost had fallen. He did not know where they were going. It was only when they took off that it became clear that they were leaving the country. “It was all really sudden.”
Ghani also alleged that his key security advisers had told him the Taliban had broken its promise not to enter Kabul. With his escape, however, he had prevented an orderly transfer of power. When he and his main political comrades had fled, the Islamists moved into the city so as to avoid, as they said, a security vacuum. Many Afghans throw Ghani, who is in the United Arab Emirates, alleged today to have extradited her to the Taliban. (APA / Red)
