In Kabul's political circles, they are known as the "Beiruti boys" – part of a generation of Afghan leaders who shaped their politics in the sandstone corridors of the American University of Beirut, where they studied together in the 1970s.
By 2018, Zalmay Khalilzad had become the US Special Representative for Afghan Reconciliation, and Ashraf Ghani was Afghanistan's president. They were two halves of a US-Afghan equation to find a solution to the resurgence of the Taliban, which was sweeping through Afghanistan while remaining uncompromising in peace talks with the Afghan government in Doha.
They were often at loggerheads. Their mutual suspicion and, ultimately, their failure to agree were partly responsible for the calamity that would eventually befall the Afghan government in August, when the Taliban captured Kabul and Mr Ghani unceremoniously left his post.
On Monday, more than two months after those events, Mr Khalilzad himself resigned.
The first time Zalmay Khalilzad and Ashraf Ghani got to know each other was not in Beirut, nor in Kabul. It was in Manhattan, in the summer of 1966, when they were among a handful of Afghan high school students chosen for a year-long exchange programme in America. Their orientation in New York was meant to acclimatise them to American life; for the young Khalilzad, it was his first time riding in a lift, or using a shower. The Afghanistan they had come from was among the poorest places in the world, and the two of them were recognised by US embassy officials in Kabul to be among the nation's best and brightest.
So it was unsurprising when, a few years later, they got USAID scholarships to go to Beirut, where they studied politics under Arab and American professors as they witnessed Lebanon gradually slide into civil war.
In a sense, so much of what has transpired in Afghanistan over the past three years was written in Beirut. According to people who knew them then, the heady atmosphere of being a politics student in a city brimming with so much politics turned Mr Khalilzad and Mr Ghani into very different people.
Mr Khalilzad was less ideological. He liked to work the room, so to speak, and find compromise in unlikely corners. In debates on campus about the conflict in Palestine and Israel, he supported a two-state solution on the basis that it was "eminently sensible" – a view most of the student body at the time thought was ridiculous. He was also elected president of the Association of Afghan Students after giving a speech warning of growing communist influence in Afghanistan. His opponent accused him of being "unserious about politics" and "pro-American". On the latter point, Mr Khalilzad says in his memoirs that he most certainly was.
A wall mural depicts US Special Representative for Afghanistan Reconciliation Zalmay Khalilzad and Taliban co-founder Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, in Kabul on July 31, 2020. AFP
Mr Ghani, on the other hand, was bookish, and kept mostly to himself. He was a stubborn socialist, and favoured action over concessions. When Daoud Khan, an autocratic general, overthrew Afghanistan's monarchy in 1973, Mr Ghani returned home to teach at Kabul University. Khan's Afghanistan was not a place Mr Khalilzad, on the other hand, wanted to go back to, and the country's radical politics were, to him, part of a regional pattern that only deflated his sense of patriotism.
"The more I learned about the broader Middle East," Mr Khalilzad writes of his time in Beirut, "the more ashamed I became of Afghanistan's particular plight."
If the people who had known them back then were told that one would eventually become a divisive, embattled Afghan president and the other a jet-setting US diplomat, it might have been easy to guess which would become which. Mr Khalilzad gradually detached himself from Afghanistan altogether, becoming a US citizen working at a think tank, writing papers on American policy towards Iraq, China and North Korea. Mr Ghani eventually became a US citizen, too, after taking jobs at US universities in the aftermath of Afghanistan's communist revolution.
When the US invaded Afghanistan in 2001, Mr Khalilzad was plucked from relative obscurity and transformed by the US policy establishment into an Afghan-American point man. Mr Ghani, meanwhile, returned home to work on the Afghan side, and relinquished his US passport when he made a bid for the presidency.
In Beirut, Khalilzad and Ghani became very different people
By 2018, Mr Ghani's government was in jeopardy, and he often appealed to the US for urgent assistance. In reality, he was appealing to Mr Khalilzad, who by then had become America's top diplomat on all things Afghanistan, having also spent short stints as Washington's ambassador to Iraq and the UN. Although Mr Ghani had the bigger title, as Afghanistan's president, in many ways Mr Khalilzad was his true American counterpart rather than the occupant of the White House.
It will have been difficult to separate the intimacy and history between them from the intimate, but much younger history between America and the Afghan republic. They certainly tried.
"This is not about Zal and Ashraf," Mr Ghani told Mr Khalilzad in one of their first meetings after peace talks between Kabul and the Taliban began. "This is now about the US and Afghanistan."
And yet, so much of it seemed personal, and in line with who "Zal" and "Ashraf" are. Mr Ghani became known in Afghanistan as a somewhat-autocratic populist, refusing to make compromises with his enemies and frequently shifting blame for his administration's failings onto alleged US conspiracies. Mr Khalilzad, in his handling of America's interests in Afghanistan, often breathed life into those allegations. The two reportedly had shouting matches often, in which Mr Khalilzad accused Mr Ghani of stubbornness, and Mr Ghani accused Mr Khalilzad of being unprincipled.
Whereas Mr Ghani refused to speak to the Taliban, Mr Khalilzad "worked the room". He used his tenure as peace envoy to negotiate side deals between the US and the Taliban, including the famous February 2020 bilateral agreement in which the US gave a timeline for its withdrawal on spurious conditions. It was made without consulting the Afghan government at all, and historians may come to view it as the beginning of the end for the Afghan republic.
It is clear to many Afghans today what was clear to Mr Ghani and Mr Khalilzad's classmates five decades ago: Mr Ghani was too deeply entrenched in a singular and probably unworkable vision for Afghanistan. Mr Khalilzad was detached from any vision at all.
It is remarkable that it was Mr Ghani who abandoned the country prematurely, and Mr Khalilzad who stuck around longer than most Afghans would have liked.
Now, with Mr Ghani in exile and Mr Khalilzad having written himself out of Afghanistan's future, the era of the Beiruti boys is over. What was about Zal and Ashraf is over. And what was about the US and Afghanistan is over, too.
Desert Warrior
Starring: Anthony Mackie, Aiysha Hart, Ben Kingsley
Director: Rupert Wyatt
Rating: 3/5
World Cricket League Division 2
In Windhoek, Namibia - Top two teams qualify for the World Cup Qualifier in Zimbabwe, which starts on March 4.
UAE fixtures
Thursday February 8, v Kenya; Friday February 9, v Canada; Sunday February 11, v Nepal; Monday February 12, v Oman; Wednesday February 14, v Namibia; Thursday February 15, final
Mercer, the investment consulting arm of US services company Marsh & McLennan, expects its wealth division to at least double its assets under management (AUM) in the Middle East as wealth in the region continues to grow despite economic headwinds, a company official said.
Mercer Wealth, which globally has $160 billion in AUM, plans to boost its AUM in the region to $2-$3bn in the next 2-3 years from the present $1bn, said Yasir AbuShaban, a Dubai-based principal with Mercer Wealth.
“Within the next two to three years, we are looking at reaching $2 to $3 billion as a conservative estimate and we do see an opportunity to do so,” said Mr AbuShaban.
Mercer does not directly make investments, but allocates clients’ money they have discretion to, to professional asset managers. They also provide advice to clients.
“We have buying power. We can negotiate on their (client’s) behalf with asset managers to provide them lower fees than they otherwise would have to get on their own,” he added.
Mercer Wealth’s clients include sovereign wealth funds, family offices, and insurance companies among others.
From its office in Dubai, Mercer also looks after Africa, India and Turkey, where they also see opportunity for growth.
Wealth creation in Middle East and Africa (MEA) grew 8.5 per cent to $8.1 trillion last year from $7.5tn in 2015, higher than last year’s global average of 6 per cent and the second-highest growth in a region after Asia-Pacific which grew 9.9 per cent, according to consultancy Boston Consulting Group (BCG). In the region, where wealth grew just 1.9 per cent in 2015 compared with 2014, a pickup in oil prices has helped in wealth generation.
BCG is forecasting MEA wealth will rise to $12tn by 2021, growing at an annual average of 8 per cent.
Drivers of wealth generation in the region will be split evenly between new wealth creation and growth of performance of existing assets, according to BCG.
Another general trend in the region is clients’ looking for a comprehensive approach to investing, according to Mr AbuShaban.
“Institutional investors or some of the families are seeing a slowdown in the available capital they have to invest and in that sense they are looking at optimizing the way they manage their portfolios and making sure they are not investing haphazardly and different parts of their investment are working together,” said Mr AbuShaban.
Some clients also have a higher appetite for risk, given the low interest-rate environment that does not provide enough yield for some institutional investors. These clients are keen to invest in illiquid assets, such as private equity and infrastructure.
“What we have seen is a desire for higher returns in what has been a low-return environment specifically in various fixed income or bonds,” he said.
“In this environment, we have seen a de facto increase in the risk that clients are taking in things like illiquid investments, private equity investments, infrastructure and private debt, those kind of investments were higher illiquidity results in incrementally higher returns.”
The Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, one of the largest sovereign wealth funds, said in its 2016 report that has gradually increased its exposure in direct private equity and private credit transactions, mainly in Asian markets and especially in China and India. The authority’s private equity department focused on structured equities owing to “their defensive characteristics.”
Starring: Tom Cruise, Val Kilmer, Jennifer Connelly, Jon Hamm, Miles Teller, Glen Powell, Ed Harris
Our family matters legal consultant
Name: Hassan Mohsen Elhais
Position: legal consultant with Al Rowaad Advocates and Legal Consultants.
Key facilities
Olympic-size swimming pool with a split bulkhead for multi-use configurations, including water polo and 50m/25m training lanes
Premier League-standard football pitch
400m Olympic running track
NBA-spec basketball court with auditorium
600-seat auditorium
Spaces for historical and cultural exploration
An elevated football field that doubles as a helipad
Specialist robotics and science laboratories
AR and VR-enabled learning centres
Disruption Lab and Research Centre for developing entrepreneurial skills
WHAT IS A BLACK HOLE?
1. Black holes are objects whose gravity is so strong not even light can escape their pull
2. They can be created when massive stars collapse under their own weight
3. Large black holes can also be formed when smaller ones collide and merge
4. The biggest black holes lurk at the centre of many galaxies, including our own
5. Astronomers believe that when the universe was very young, black holes affected how galaxies formed
Unresolved crisis
Russia and Ukraine have been locked in a bitter conflict since 2014, when Ukraine’s Kremlin-friendly president was ousted, Moscow annexed Crimea and then backed a separatist insurgency in the east.
Fighting between the Russia-backed rebels and Ukrainian forces has killed more than 14,000 people. In 2015, France and Germany helped broker a peace deal, known as the Minsk agreements, that ended large-scale hostilities but failed to bring a political settlement of the conflict.
The Kremlin has repeatedly accused Kiev of sabotaging the deal, and Ukrainian officials in recent weeks said that implementing it in full would hurt Ukraine.
Who's who in Yemen conflict
Houthis: Iran-backed rebels who occupy Sanaa and run unrecognised government
Yemeni government: Exiled government in Aden led by eight-member Presidential Leadership Council
Southern Transitional Council: Faction in Yemeni government that seeks autonomy for the south
Habrish 'rebels': Tribal-backed forces feuding with STC over control of oil in government territory
What can you do?
Document everything immediately; including dates, times, locations and witnesses
Seek professional advice from a legal expert
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You can use the Ministry of Human Resources and Emiratisation’s dedicated hotline
In criminal cases, you can contact the police for additional support