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 Ashraf Ghani, who holds a PhD degree in Anthropology from Colombia University in New York, is an Afghan-American intellectual who served briefly as Hamid Karzai's chief advisor in his interim administration and eventually was chosen as Afghanistan's finance minister from 2002 - 2004, during Hamid Karzai's transitional administration. Before joining the Afghan government, Ghani held positions with the United Nations and the World Bank, and helped prepare the Bonn Agreement.
Because of his success at carrying out a series of important reforms as finance minister, he was voted as the best finance minister of Asia in 2003 by Emerging Markets. Ghani is a strong advocate of foreign investment in Afghanistan, and even today works towards having Afghanistan be seen as a great opportunity for investment, not a charity.
When Afghanistan's new constitution was put it place, it required that the president's cabinet members must have only Afghan citizenship and so dual citizenships were not allowed. Not wanting to give up his American citizenship, Ghani declined to remain as finance minister and instead asked to be appointed as Chancellor of Kabul University. He later resigned from his position as Kabul University Chancellor and in 2005 co-founded and is currently chairman of the Institute for State Effectiveness (ISE). On their website, it states that the ISE "uses a citizen-centered perspective to rethink the fundamentals of the relationship between citizens, the state and the market in the context of globalization."
Ashraf Ghani wrote a book titled The Framework: Fixing Failed States, with Clare Lockhart (also from the the Institute for State Effectiveness), and was published in May 2008 by Oxford University Press.
Ghani was born in 1949 in the province of Logar.
by Abdullah Qazi / October 15, 2008 | 
