General Murad Ali Murad, the former Deputy Chief of Staff of the Afghan Army, said that "the negligence of the Afghan politicians and leaders" weakened the army during the previous regime. Murad added that former president Ashraf Ghani viewed the army through an ethnic lens.
In an interview with Afghanistan International on Wednesday, he said that Ashraf Ghani appointed incompetent army officers to head the security institutions of Afghanistan.
The former Deputy Chief of Staff of the Army stressed that the Afghan army was well-trained and equipped, however, indirectly he also approved former president’s inner circle’s narrative that the Afghan army collapsed due to global and regional conspiracy and the Taliban took over Afghanistan.
However, in the interview, General Murad blamed the presidential palace for the defeat of the previous government’s army in Afghanistan; a criticism that Ghani, his former Vice-President Armullah Saleh, and other senior aides to the former president rejected.
Murad accused Ghani and his security team of "pulling out experienced and educated generals from the leadership of the Afghan army, police and other security agencies and appointing inexperienced junior and young officers at leading positions of the security and defense forces”.
Ashraf Ghani's government, within the framework of the plan to reform the Afghan security forces, had retired and dismissed hundreds of military personnel and placed some young military personnel at important positions, such as the command of the army corps.
During this interview, Murad did not try to analyse the collapse of the Afghan army from a military point of view and stressed that there was a conspiracy against the security forces inside the government.
He said, "The enemies fought with us during the day and were equipped and financed at night. Even their wounded were dragged from the battlefield.”
