Ashraf Ghani

A candidate for the presidency of Afghanistan, Ashraf Ghani has worked extensively in international finance, and holds a doctorate in anthropology from Columbia University. After the fall of the Taliban in 2001 until December 2004, he served as Finance Minister until he chose not to join the new elected Government. While in the interim government, October 2001 and June 2002, Ashraf Ghani served as Special Advisor to the UN Secretary General’s Special Representative for Afghanistan, Lakhdar Brahimi, Chief Advisor to Chairman Karzai and Executive Director of the Afghan Assistance Coordination Authority. Earlier, he had been involved in the 2001 Bonn Peace Agreement that selected Karzai.

Early in his career, he was on the faculty at Johns Hopkins University and the University of California at Berkeley Universities before joining the World Bank, where, as an anthropologist, he led work on country strategies and policies; he remains on the adjunct faculty at Hopkins.

Karzai government
As Afghanistan's Finance Minister in 2003 he was awarded Asia's Best Finance Minister of the Year and the Sayed Jamal-ud-Din Afghani medal. He prepare the first national budget and aid requests.

After leaving government
He is now Chairman and co-founder of the Institute for State Effectiveness, and was Chancellor of Kabul University. Until recently, he was a nonresident senior fellow of the Brookings Institution. He is on the Commission on the UN High-Level Panel on Legal Empowerment of the Poor, IDEA, the Atlantic Council, and the World Justice Project of the American Bar Association.

In 2006, Hamid Karzai nominated him for UN Secretary General and was endorsed by the Wall Street Journal. In 2007, he was also endorsed by the New York Times for the post of President of the World Bank. In 2008, he was awared the Dr Jean Mayer Global Citizenship Award by Tufts University.

Current views
He proposes major reforms to minimize corruption, including financial disclosure, and eventually the replacement of many current government workers with younger Afghans. While the United States has not endorsed a candidate, he is known to be highly acceptable, and has already been offered a position, which he declined, of Chief Executive Officer under Karzai; he has said he will consider that if he does not win. His book Fixing Failed States, written with Clare Lockhart, was published in Spring 2008 by Oxford University Press.