“Everyone is failing us.” These were the first words that Ashraf Ghani uttered — not as he fled the advancing Taliban on Aug. 15, 2021, but in March 2002 as we sat down to dinner on a chilly and wet night on my first post-9/11 visit to Kabul. I had known him since 1984, first as an academic colleague and then as a World Bank official. We had collaborated as informal advisors to U.N. envoy Lakhdar Brahimi during his first assignment from 1997 to 1999, and then as part of the United Nations team in 2001, when the two of us served as Brahimi’s advisors during the Bonn Conference that set the framework for the post-Taliban government.
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