Khalid Payenda, who resigned as finance minister only days before Kabul fell to the Taliban, now works as an Uber driver in and around Washington, in addition to teaching at Georgetown University for $2,000 per semester. In a conversation with the Washington Post, Ashraf Ghani's former finance minister said he is glad for the jobs he has found because they allow him to provide for his wife and four children.
Payenda told the Washington Post that he resigned as finance minister because Ashraf Ghani confronted him at a public gathering about his ministry's inability to make a payment to a Lebanese firm. Payenda was worried that by seeing Ghani's wrath, he had detained him on bogus allegations. He claimed he hurriedly left the nation and arrived in the United States as he narrated how he arrived in the US from then-conflict-torn Kabul. His family had already gone for the United States a week prior.
“Right now, I don’t have any place,” he said. “I don’t belong here, and I don’t belong there. It’s a very empty feeling," Payenda said
Payenda first learned about Kabul's collapse through television and later through Twitter. "All we created was a house of cards that came falling down so quickly. The basis of a house of cards is corruption. Even when we had a narrow, last-chance, some of us in the government opted to steal. We betrayed our countrymen, "In an interview, the former minister stated.
In the days that followed, Payenda's former ministers formed a WhatsApp group to vent their frustrations at those who had fled the country. Payenda claimed he stayed away from the mudslinging because he didn't see the value.
Khalid Payenda has been outside of his own country before. When he was 11 years old, his family relocated to Pakistan when the civil war in Afghanistan broke out. "After the Americans defeated the Taliban a decade later, he returned to co-found Afghanistan's first private university," according to the story.
He had previously worked for the US Agency for International Development and the World Bank, and in 2008, he traveled to the United States for the first time to pursue a Fulbright scholarship at the University of Illinois. He was appointed deputy finance minister in 2006 and transferred to the United States in 2019. When he went to Kabul in 2020 to work on a short-term project for Ghani, he was given the finance ministership. Payenda now regrets his action because his family was opposed to the proposition.
The former minister said he visited an unauthorized customs station near Kandahar months before Kabul fell. When he questioned the police officers in charge of the multi-million-dollar-per-day activities, he was held at gunpoint, and the footage of the incident is still on the minister's smartphone.
"What had led the Afghan state to be destroyed by widespread corruption? Selfishness? Incompetence in the Afghan bureaucracy? A US policy that rewarded warlords who excelled in assassinating Taliban, regardless of their cruelty or the amount of money they stole? The former minister said he thinks about these issues while attending lectures at Georgetown University.
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