A Conversation With Ajmal Ahmady, Afghanistan’s Former Central Bank Chief

Tracy Alloway (0:10)

Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots Podcast. I'm Tracy Alloway.

Joe Weisenthal (0:15)

And I'm Joe Weisenthal.

Tracy Alloway (0:17)

So Joe, clearly one of the top news stories, probably the top news story at the moment is the situation in Afghanistan and the very, very swift change in the direction of events there. So just a week ago, things were, I guess I wanna say relatively normal. Obviously, the Taliban had advanced throughout the country, but Kabul was still operating on a fairly normal basis. And then fast forward just seven days or so, we're recording this on August 20th.

Everything has changed.

Joe Weisenthal (0:52)

I think it was last Saturday or last Sunday, I'm sort of losing track of the dates. There was clearly a very rapid advance of the Taliban, but then there was some question, it was like, oh, how many days or weeks will there be a pressure on Kabul? And then it seemed to happen in basically an instant.

Tracy Alloway (1:11)

So clearly there are a lot of questions swirling around the situation in Afghanistan right now, but given that this is Odd Lots, we're going to focus on one question in particular, which is what exactly happens to the Afghani economy? And we have the perfect person to talk about it. We're gonna be speaking with Ajmal Ahmady, who has been the central banker in Afghanistan since the middle of last year. Before that, he was the Minister of Commerce and Industry.

He has left the country under very, very chaotic circumstances, but he's been very gracious in his time and agreed to come on Odd Lots. So Ajmal, thank you so much for joining the show.

Ajmal Ahmady (1:55)

Thank you very much for having me.

Tracy Alloway (1:57)

So I guess my first question has to be, what was your experience like of actually getting out of the country? Because the scenes that we saw in Kabul over the weekend, people desperately trying to get to the airport and leave on a very limited number of planes were very, very upsetting and disturbing and memorable as well. So how did you manage to get out?

Ajmal Ahmady (2:22)

Well, thank you again for having me. On the day of the fall, which was last Sunday, I was in my office conducting work. Obviously, the situation was rapidly deteriorating. And so as new information came in, we found out that Pulichari Prison, which is just slightly west of Kabul had fallen and that there were reports that Taliban had entered the city. At that point, I decided to go for the airport. I didn't have a ticket for that day, but I thought it perhaps would be the safest place to go to be. And so we drove there.

The airport road, which now you can see on CNN, was crowded, but yet had not become as chaotic as we've seen now. We were able to make it in.

And what I attempted to do was try to find a ticket for that evening. And I was able to secure a ticket for that evening on a flight, which subsequently was canceled. It's the plane that you see on the tarmac, everyone is trying to scramble upon. We went on that flight, but I think around 4 p.m. we received the notice that the president himself had already left.

And at that point, I think I kind of instinctively knew that chaos would begin at that point. So everyone tried to fight on the plane. I got on the plane for a little while, but realized it wasn't leaving.

At which point went on the tarmac and there were already hundreds of people there.

It was a bit of a surreal scene where helicopters were taking off. A military plane was taking off. I think anyone who had access to any type of aircraft were just scrambling to jump on a plane. There was one military plane, not from the US, from a third country, and people were scrambling to get on board that. There was, I think, I believe it's called a C-17, where the back comes down and up. And that was going up. And my friends helped me push me on that plane. And they were evacuating their own embassy staff. So I was not supposed to be on that plane. But I think they felt it, or they probably believed that I was embassy staff and they let me on that plane. And I was very fortunate to get out.

Joe Weisenthal (4:40)

Wow, incredible.

You know, you've been tweeting these pretty, these threads about the sort of the situation right now, and including the last several days, given the intensity of the moment and the chaos in general, there's, you know, they're incredibly lucid and clear and helpful. Can you talk about those few days earlier? Like, what was your expectation? You're running the Central Bank, and we'll get into what management of the Central Bank looks like. But obviously it was sort of a split second decision, it sounds like, to actually get to the airport and leave. Where was your head at, say, three or four days earlier, as you're thinking about, okay, there is this rapid advance of the Taliban, but your job is to keep the banking system running?