Afghan ambassador to the US slams Biden, doesn’t trust US
Afghanistan’s ambassador to the US is slamming the Biden administration for its calamitous military withdrawal from the war-torn nation, adding that she would “question” and “laugh” at the US’ ability to spread democracy.
Adela Raz was asked if she still trusts the US in a new interview with “Axios on HBO.”
“No. Sorry,” she said.
She was then asked if Afghans would “ever trust an American president again?”
“Not soon probably. I’m sorry to say that,” Raz said.
The interview with Raz was taped last Monday in Afghanistan’s embassy in Washington, where she works representing a government taken over by the Taliban following the US pullout in August.
“If you talk about democracy — I probably will question it and laugh at it,” she responded to a question about the US as leader of the free world, and its ability to spread democracy. “You were engaged in building one in Afghanistan, and the people believed in it.”
Raz, 35, refuses to leave her post or recognize the Taliban, and said she considers herself still the ambassador — even though the Biden White House won’t meet with her.
“By meeting me formally, probably they will legitimize the position, and that probably will upset the Taliban,” she told Axios.
Raz said she remembers when the US invaded Afghanistan and removed the Taliban from power, leaving her to believe: “This is the end of miseries of Afghanistan because US is the superpower. When it arrives, that’s it. It’s the end of it.”
In the years following, she attended schools in the US and returned to Afghanistan in 2013 to work for the government, rising to become Afghanistan’s first female ambassador to the United Nations and then ambassador to the US.
Now, in the wake of the US military pullout, her expectations have come crashing down.
She said she feels guilty for encouraging Afghan women to remain in the country amid hope for a new future after the Taliban were removed from power.
“One of them was a young woman that was assassinated. She was a human rights advocate,” Raz said.
Asked if Biden cares about the fate of women in Afghanistan, Raz said: “I don’t think so. He said the US could not be the police of the world, to protect women in any other country.”
Raz said she and her fellow Afghans were excited when Biden won the presidency and believed that he wouldn’t follow through on former President Donald Trump’s plans to pull out as part of the deal he struck with the Taliban in February 2020.
But she said she later began to accept that the withdrawal would move forward, without any plan to maintain “achievements that the Afghan society has made.”
“It was very well accepted to me and to a lot of us — we said that the US troops would withdraw, but there has to be conditions on the Taliban that they commit to the achievements that the Afghan society has made,” she said.
