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Afghanistan’s Ambassador to the United States Adela Raz has lost her country and her faith in the United States government – and her life’s work to free women and girls is in ruins. She shared her desperation with “Axios on HBO” in her first TV interview since the fall of Kabul.
The big picture: Raz has said, bluntly, that she doesn’t think President Biden cares about the plight of Afghan women and girls. She also revealed new details to Axios indicating that former President Ashraf Ghani’s secret escape was more premeditated than public knowledge.
In a devastating moment, she suggested that she felt guilty for encouraging Afghan women to believe in a new future and to serve with her in government, and for those she had encouraged to stay in Afghanistan.
- “One of them was a young woman who was murdered. She was a human rights activist,” Raz said in tears.
Driving the news: The interview was recorded last Monday in Raz’s office on the top floor of the Afghan embassy in Washington.
- She works there – actually a refugee representing a leaderless government in exile.
- She refuses to recognize the Taliban or quit her post – and said she still sees herself as her country’s ambassador – but the Biden administration has refused to meet with her.
The plot: She has kept the embassy open with a small staff and flies her country’s tricolor in the courtyard instead of the white Taliban flag.
- Raz choked, staring out of his office window at the tricolor. “This is how I know I am Afghan,” she said.
Why is this important: Raz said she no longer trusted the US government and doubted an Afghan would trust US policies for a long time.
- “If you talk about democracy, I’m probably going to question it and laugh at it,” she said, when asked if she saw America as the leader of the free world. “You were engaged in building one in Afghanistan, and people believed in it.”
- She criticized Biden’s refusal to renegotiate former President Donald Trump’s deal with the Taliban – a deal that offered no protection for Afghan women after the US withdrawal.
- But she also told Axios in a separate phone interview that she has full confidence in the American people and is deeply grateful for the sacrifices that the American military and civilians have made over the past 20 years in her country. She said she was devastated, these gains were not protected.
Raz said his own government has failed on several fronts, including the leadership of Ghani.
She said the Afghan security forces relied too much on U.S. technical expertise and air support, and collapsed when the U.S. pulled out after 20 years of funding and training.
She said Ghani – her former boss – owed the Afghans an explanation for his “betrayal” by secretly fleeing the country and effectively handing over Kabul to the Taliban without a fight.
Go back: Raz was 16 in 2002, when the Americans invaded Afghanistan and swept the Taliban from power. She said she remembers thinking, “This is the end of Afghanistan’s miseries because the United States is the superpower. When they get there, that’s it. It’s the end.”
- She went back to school, got scholarships to attend U.S. universities, and in 2013 returned to Afghanistan to take up leadership positions in government.
- She became Afghanistan’s first female ambassador to the United Nations. Then, in July, Ghani appointed her Ambassador of Afghanistan to the United States. She moved with her two children to Washington.
- Her husband, Abdul Matin Bek, has been one of Ghani’s main collaborators in Kabul.
Raz spent his first month in Washington advocate with the Biden administration – publicly and privately – to provide greater military support to the Afghan security services.
- Then, within weeks in early August, just a month after arriving in Washington, she lost her country and everything she had worked for.
- Raz told Axios that a few days before August 15, her husband told her that he noticed Ghani was having meetings with only two of his top associates. He found the meetings exceptionally secret.
- “I was very sarcastic,” Raz said. “I said, ‘Oh, they’re probably working on the evacuation plan.’ She was almost certainly right.
And after: Raz, 35, now finds himself in an extraordinary situation.
- The State Department and the Pentagon canceled scheduled meetings with her in early September, she said, detailing the rejected requests. “By meeting me formally, they will probably legitimize the position, and that will probably upset the Taliban,” she said.
- Raz told Axios that she contacted the Biden administration for advice on the U.S. position regarding the Afghan embassy in Washington.
- A State Department spokesperson responded, “Ambassador Adela Raz is the accredited representative of Afghanistan to the United States. There are a number of considerations that go into meeting requests from any foreign ambassador. We are unable to comment on the details of the US diplomatic engagement. . “
- “Given the change of leadership in Kabul, our goal in Afghanistan is whether a future government is one that we and the international community can work with.
A group that To reached out to Raz is the Taliban. She said they tried to get her and other ambassadors on a Zoom appeal. She ignored the invitation.
- Raz told Axios that she would not serve a Taliban government under any circumstances. She knows what it’s like to live under Taliban rule, and she feels “terrible” to think that there may never be another woman to represent her country abroad.
- “I didn’t want to be the last,” she said. “I had agreed to be the first, but not the last.”
Look : Ambassador Raz speaks about President Biden’s decision to withdraw from Afghanistan.
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