As Uncertainty Reigns Back Home, Many Afghan Envoys Decline to Return
By ROD NORDLAND
Published: July 12, 2013
KABUL, Afghanistan — When it comes to expressing confidence in Afghanistan's future, many of the country's diplomats seem to be voting with their feet when their tours of duty end.
"It's a huge brain drain," he said. "We have lost some of our best and most experienced diplomats over the years."
The Foreign Affairs Ministry says there is no significant problem. "If a small and limited number of Afghans do not return home for personal or family reasons, this must not be represented as a lack of commitment and patriotism on the part of Afghan diplomats as a whole," said Ershad Ahmadi, the deputy foreign minister.
"Publishing such reports is rooted in negative propaganda of those who are against the people of Afghanistan," he said.
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.
The Foreign Affairs Ministry issued a clarification saying that the tenures of only 96 diplomats had ended, and that 32 of them had been granted "temporary extension of their assignment for work-related requirements." Although only 15 have returned, the ministry said, the rest intend to come back after "handing over their responsibilities to their successors."
The diplomatic drain parallels a broader effort by Afghans to make sure they have a foothold abroad in case things go badly after the Western military withdrawal, which is scheduled to be completed in 2014. Western countries have been barraged by visa applications from Afghans, and many who have been stymied by the slow visa process are resorting to seeking asylum.
Since 2011, according to the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, more asylum seekers have left Afghanistan than any other country, about 36,000 a year, and they have applied for permission to stay in nearly all of the world's industrialized countries. The previous time when Afghan asylum requests were that high was in 2001, when the Taliban were in power.
To claim asylum, though, they first have to reach the other country. Many go through people smugglers, across Asia and through Turkey, or by boat to places like Australia. But for the diplomatic corps, the problem of getting abroad has already been solved.
Mr. Samad said that when he was ambassador to Canada, only two of the seven diplomats posted in Ottawa returned between 2004 and 2009, and that in Toronto, even fewer did. While he was in Paris, from 2009 to 2011, two-thirds returned, he said.
Before 2006, however, diplomatic attrition rates were no more than 5 percent, he said.
The practice often begins at the top, with ambassadors who leave their posts and do not return. A former ambassador to Washington, Said Tayeb Jawad, joined a diplomacy project at Harvard after his tenure ended in 2010 and then went to Johns Hopkins. Jawed Ludin, a former ambassador to Canada, did return, to take up a post as deputy foreign minister, but he resigned from the ministry this year to become an executive for a Saudi firm, Anham, based in the United States.
Many ambassadors have dual citizenship, making it easy for them to stay away — Mr. Samad is also American, for example. Lower-level diplomatic staff members often have to resort to going underground or applying for asylum, as many emigrants from Afghanistan already do.
In Washington, the State Department has started turning down visa requests from Afghan diplomats to bring along their extended families, like brothers, sisters and parents.
Many of the Afghans still in the diplomatic service are lobbying to get extensions that would see them through until the end of 2014.
"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."
Mr. Samad, the former envoy in Canada, said: "It has caused troubles in terms of host countries. Basically they see there is little authority or competence in embassies, so they bypass them and deal directly with Kabul."
Foreign service defections are mirrored in other areas as well. Many relief groups, international agencies and embassies say they are finding it increasingly difficult to get visas for Afghan staff members to travel to Europe or North America for training and educational programs, because so many fail to return when their visas expire.
The clamor for visas in Afghanistan has led many smaller embassies to close their visa operations in Kabul entirely. Dutch officials said they were forced to do so last year after the embassy officer in charge of visa processing, Mary Sarwary, an Afghan, went on a professional visit to the Netherlands and did not come back.
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