We’ve heard an awful lot about Biden’s disastrous withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan. But, one thing we haven’t heard much about is the swift exit of the installed president of Afghanistan, Ashraf Ghani. Unlike the tens of thousands of Afghan allies who risked their lives to help our troops, the former Afghan president who lived in the lap of luxury was able to make it safely out of the Islamic nation without a single hair on his head being harmed.
Videos showing the Taliban terrorists entering the palace where Ghani lived before he fled with the country with as much money as he could stuff into his helicopter. Americans were stunned to see the inside of the opulent palace where the installed president lived.
Here is one of the videos showing the inside of Ghani’s palace:
Russian media TASS reported that four cars packed with money followed Ghani to the airport, where they tried to jam all of the money into the helicopter. “Not all the cash managed to squeeze in, and some of the money was left lying on the airfield,” a mission employee said.
A BBC reporter, citing Ambassador to Tajikistan Mohammad Zahir Aghbar, said Ghani reportedly left the country with $169 million of unclear origin. The report supports allegations from Russian officials this week that Ghani rapidly stuffed suitcases with cash upon hearing the news of the Taliban’s arrival and attempted to take so much of it that it did not all fit in the four cars and helicopter that he took with him.
Breitbart reported about Ghani’s departue from Afghanistan – Rumors that Ghani and other senior officials had fled the country caused chaotic scenes at Kabul’s international airport, according to those in the capital. Mobs swarmed the tarmacs attempting to get onboard U.S. military planes as commercial airlines indefinitely canceled their flights, reportedly causing at least three deaths as of Monday.
“All the VIPs were being allowed to fly out first, all their cash was being transported first,” Kamal Alam, a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, told CNBC on Monday. “So people were seeing this, there was a lot of resentment and anger from the airport security, and that is really where the rot started. That’s when people started saying this government and this president is not worth defending, let’s get out of here.”
Like Karzai before him, Ghani’s government was defined by widespread corruption at almost every level. Afghan officials themselves documented and exposed the corruption to no avail. In May, former Finance Minister Mohammad Khalid Painda told the nation’s lawmakers that his investigations had revealed that Afghan customs officials embezzled $8 million a day. He said that as much as 80 percent of customs revenue was going “to the mafia and the Taliban.”
Last week, the New York Post wrote an extensive piece that examined the luxurious lifestyle of Ghani’s wealthy, activist children with ties to prominent Democrats and billionaire Democrat donors.
Days after Afghan president Ashraf Ghani fled Kabul, his artist daughter Mariam Ghani urged her 3,000-plus Instagram followers to sign an online petition — demanding that the US and “governments around the world” come to the rescue of refugees, including cultural workers, stuck in Afghanistan and at the mercy of the marauding Taliban.
She also posted an image of American soldiers rescuing an Afghan woman and criticized Americans for making the Taliban appear to be so brutal that people no longer care about their dignity and honor. She mocked the Afghani people for running away, saying “those who run away cannot be Afghan, accusing them of selling “their respect and honor to the invaders for twenty years and will sell them outside the country.”
Meanwhile, 43-year-old Mariam was issuing appeals from her sunny, million-dollar loft in a converted Clinton Hill factory building.
“I’m angry and grieving and terribly afraid for family, friends, and colleagues left behind in Afghanistan, and working feverishly to do anything I can on their behalf,” she told her followers.
Her brother Tarek, 39, who has a limited social media presence, watched the fast-moving chaos in Afghanistan from the $1.2 million Washington, DC, townhouse that he shares with his wife, Beth Pearson. They are a rising power couple in the US capital: Pearson, a Rhodes Scholar, is a senior aide to Sen. Elizabeth Warren; Tarek, a professor of business strategy, was an advisor to Pete Buttigieg’s 2020 presidential campaign.
Tarek and his sister have spent their lives connected to elites within the Democratic Party and owe their education and, in part, livelihoods to billionaire Democratic donors — the same power players who have bankrolled their father throughout his career as a technocrat at the World Bank and in leadership positions in his native Afghanistan.
Ashraf, 72, became Afghanistan’s president in 2014, but before that, he raked in hundreds of thousands annually as chair of the Institute for State Effectiveness, a Washington, DC, nonprofit he co-founded in 2007. The group works to “develop integrated approaches to state-building,” and around 2007 received a $40 million grant from the Clinton Global Initiative, the non-profit founded by the former president.
His wife, Rula, 73, is co-chair of the Afghan Women’s Council at Georgetown University, alongside former US first ladies Hillary Clinton and Laura Bush.
Ashraf’s group has also been supported by grants from the Open Society Foundations, set up by billionaire philanthropist George Soros, who has donated billions to liberal causes around the world.
Ashraf’s connections to the billionaire and the Clintons opened doors for his children in elite academic and political circles, a political observer who knows the family told The Post.
After the Soviet-backed coup in Afghanistan in 1979, the couple decided to remain in exile in the US, eventually settling in a leafy middle-class Baltimore suburb where Ashraf took up a teaching position at Johns Hopkins. In 1991, he began his 11-year career at the World Bank and became a UN advisor.
The family’s Democratic party connections were cemented after the 9/11 terrorist attacks and Ashraf’s tenure at the World Bank. That same year, Mariam, a budding artist, and activist, received a grant from the Soros family to finance her studies in film and video.
A year after graduating from New York University with a degree in comparative literature in 2000, she received a Paul and Daisy Soros Fellowship for New Americans to study photography and film at the School of Visual Arts, a Manhattan art and design college that charges more than $40,000 a year in tuition.
It’s not clear how much money Mariam — whose activist artwork has focused on criminal justice reform — received from the foundation. Currently run by the widow of Paul Soros, the late shipping tycoon brother of George, the organization awards just 30 scholarships a year to immigrants or their children to pursue post-graduate work. Today, such scholarships are worth $90,000, according to the foundation’s website.
When his father became minister of finance after the US invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, Tarek took a year off from his undergraduate studies at Stanford to travel to Kabul, where he worked to help his father stabilize the country’s currency.
Mariam joined her brother in Afghanistan in 2002 when she was 24. It was the first time the siblings had traveled to their father’s country of birth.
Like his sister, Tarek’s focus has been on poverty and abuse of power — war, structural inequality, and climate change, as well as security and strategy in the global economy, according to his Twitter profile.
Over the last two years, he took a break from his teaching job at Washington University in St Louis to work as a chief economist for the International Crisis Group, a non-profit co-founded by George Soros that features Soros’s playboy son Alex on its board of directors.
In May 2016, Alex posted a photo of Tarek, Mariam, and their mother, who was honored by the Asia Foundation for her work empowering women as the first lady of Afghanistan, on his Facebook page. He called Tarek “one of the best friends I have.”
As deputy chair of his father’s Open Society Foundations, Alex — who hosted games of drunken hide-and-seek with models and fashion designers at his “Club Soros” Hamptons mansion — has done a great deal to support his friend. In addition to his academic post, Tarek is a nonresident fellow at the Brookings Institute; a Washington think tank partly funded by the Open Society Foundations.
Tarek has support from other Democratic billionaires, too, and once oversaw grants at Humanity United, a non-profit connected to eBay founder Pierre Omidyar. Two years ago, he worked as an advisor for national security and foreign policy in Buttigieg’s presidential campaign and has contributed articles to “Foreign Affairs” magazine, most recently about the effects of COVID-19 on the world’s poorest countries.
Last year, during Black Lives Matter protests after the death of George Floyd in police custody in Minneapolis, she bitterly complained about police crackdowns of protestors in New York, comparing them to police violence in Afghanistan. “So: we have a curfew, aerial surveillance, and cops in military-surplus riot gear,” she posted next to a video of a helicopter buzzing above her Brooklyn loft. “#NYC looks (and sounds) more like #Kabul all the time.”
It’s curious why the dishonest media has absolutely no interest in the children of the Afghan president accused of stealing $169 million from Afghanistan, while leaving tens of thousands of Afghan allies behind to be tortured or killed by Taliban animals. Could their connections to the Soros family or Hillary Clinton’s crooked foundation be the reason they have no interest, or are they too busy chasing down Joe Biden to discover his favorite flavor of ice cream?
