Many thousands of Afghanistani people with foreign citizenship who work in Afghanistan for US and NATO, including all mediators serving for the coalition forces, business-men who could enrich themselves do not intend to stay or settle in Afghanistan in post-2014 '[...]More than 60 percent of Afghan diplomats decide to remain abroad, a trend that has been increasing steadily, according to Omar Samad, a former ambassador to Paris. He went to the United States when he was replaced in 2011, and he is now a senior fellow at the New America Foundation. “It’s a huge brain drain,” he said. “We have lost some of our best and most experienced diplomats over the years.” Mr. Ahmadi was responding to a report on the Web site of the German magazine Der Spiegel that said that of 105 Afghan diplomats ordered back to Kabul by the end of June, only 5 had shown up. The report said most of those who had stayed on had applied for extensions in their assignments or had claimed asylum in their assigned countries. “It’s the 2014 transition,” said Mahmoud Saikal, a former ambassador to Australia, speaking from Canberra, the capital, where he is lecturing at a university (on a temporary contract, he said). “Things are not clear; nobody is sure there will be a free and fair election. Securitywise the last few months we have seen a rapid disintegration of security at all levels, so the picture to some of our diplomats is not very good.” Mr. Saikal said part of the attrition problem was a result of widespread nepotism in the Foreign Affairs Ministry — President Hamid Karzai’s uncle Azizullah Karzai is the ambassador to Russia, for example — along with corruption and a decline in the quality of the diplomatic staff as more and more experienced diplomats stay away. He himself returned after his posting in Australia and took up the job of deputy foreign minister. “I wanted to set an example,” he said. He soon quit, and he has now joined the opposition National Coalition party. “The Foreign Ministry is looked at as a place where brothers and sisters could come, like a holiday resort — that’s what our embassies have turned into,” Mr. Saikal said. “There is very little diplomacy involved.[...]” mobile.nytimes/2013/07/13/world/asia/once-abroad-many-afghan-diplomats-never-return.html?pagewanted=all&
Posted on: Sat, 13 Jul 2013 16:07:03 +0000