How Ghani, Afghanistan's President Went From Hero to Villain-in-Hiding

Ashraf Ghani's whereabouts are a mystery after he fled Afghanistan on Sunday. Reports have spotted him everywhere from Tajikistan to Oman to Abu Dhabi.

If anyone was supposed to know how to fix Afghanistan, it was Ashraf Ghani. Before becoming president in 2014, Ghani spent much of his life studying how to boost growth in poor nations. A Fulbright Scholar with a doctorate from Columbia University, he taught at some of America's elite academic institutions before stints at the World Bank and United Nations. Later he co-wrote "Fixing Failed States: A Framework for Rebuilding a Fractured World." Now Ghani's whereabouts are a mystery after he fled Afghanistan on Sunday. Reports have spotted him everywhere from Tajikistan to Oman to Abu Dhabi, with the Russians claiming he left with four cars and a helicopter full of cash. In Afghanistan he's become a villain: his central bank chief and key members of his administration have denounced him publicly. Efforts to reach him or his close aides were unsuccessful. In many ways, Ghani's swift downfall reflects the broader failures of the U.S. to impose a government on Afghanistan that had buy-in from a range of competing power brokers with a long history of fighting on the battlefield rather than at the ballot box. Although he was a Pashtun, the country's dominant ethnic group, Ghani was seen as an outsider who lacked the political touch to unite disparate factions, and he became more isolated over time.