Retired career diplomat to follow bass at US embassy in Kabul

Monitoring Desk

KABUL: The New York Times reports that Ross Wilson, a retired career ambassador who was previously the top American diplomat in Turkey, Azerbaijan and Georgia, will replace John Bass, whose two-year tenure as US envoy in Kabul ended this week.

Wilson is taking a leave of absence from the Atlantic Council think tank and the nonprofit Global Minnesota networking organization to run the embassy in Kabul until a permanent ambassador is nominated, the State Department official said as quoted by The New York Times.

The report says that Wilson is expected to arrive in Kabul soon.

John Bass was serving as the US envoy in Kabul since December 2017.

Mr. Bass took to Twitter on Monday to announce the end of his mission in Kabul: “It is time for Holly and I to leave Afghanistan. We will cherish our memories of the Eid holiday in 2018 when peace fell over the whole country and Afghans saw it was possible for both sides to stop the violence,” the outgoing ambassador said.

“My earnest hope is for leaders and citizens across this country to find strength in unity, put aside their differences, and work together to negotiate a political settlement with the Taliban. Afghans and this beautiful country deserve nothing less,” Bass tweeted.

Mr. Bass has spoken out strongly against corruption Afghanistan; in a recent interview with TOLOnews’ LotfullahNajafizada, Bass said:

“If I look ahead over the next couple of years, what concerns me about Afghanistan–obviously the levels of violence, the complexity of solving the conflict– but the second thing that concerns me is the number of people in this society, but particularly here in Kabul, who have a sense of entitlement about the flow of financial resources from the international community, from other governments, from taxpayers in democratic societies that will come to Afghanistan. They seem to expect that we will continue to provide hundreds of millions of dollars in funding regardless of whether it is spent well, regardless of whether it achieves the intended results because we have done so in the past.

He warned that if corruption continues, the international community will lose faith:

“As I said at the conference on international anti-corruption day, you know, if this society—if your government, if the people who claim to be acting in the interest of the Afghan people cannot do a better job of ensuring that the resources from the international community are used for their intended purposes, you will not hear my government and other governments speaking more loudly about this, you are going to hear them saying less because they will lose faith and confidence that resources going to be used well here and they’re going to turn their attention to very compelling problems in other societies,” said Bass.

In the interview, he also stressed the need to take the opportunity for peace in Afghanistan, and stated that the winner of the Afghan presidential elections will not have a “commanding mandate” with “fewer than a million votes in a country of over 30 million people in which over nine million people are registered to vote.” Bass said it’s not “a signal that a large majority of the people support the winner.”

He suggested that the new leader approach the role “with a bit of humility and with an understanding that they will be the next leader but they need to reach out to other political factions, they need to be governing inclusively, they need to be listening to the desires and the fears and the objectives of a wider cross-section of society and to govern in a way where people feel they are being heard.”(TOLOnews)