British diplomat Paddy Ashdown has announced he will not take on a UN post as a so-called "super envoy" to Afghanistan after Afghan President Hamid Karzai suddenly revoked his support.
Ashdown, who was Bosnia-Herzegovina's postwar international administrator, said that he accepted the job this month after UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon asked him to be overall coordinator of international aid, government and political efforts in Afghanistan.
Ashdown, speaking on Sunday on British Broadcasting Corp television, said he initially had the blessing of Karzai, with whom he met last month in Kuwait to discuss the new role.
But Karzai changed his mind and in the past few days, raised objections during meetings with British Prime Minister Gordon Brown and US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, the Times of London reported. Brown's office declined to comment on the private meeting.
An EU diplomat also said Karzai had conveyed reservations about Ashdown to Brussels last week.
"I wouldn't have dreamed of undertaking the job unless [Karzai] agreed that I should do so. After I saw the UN secretary-general, we shook hands albeit over a telephone," Ashdown said on BBC television.
"Now something's happened that's changed his view. I think that's far more to do with Afghan internal politics than it has with the international community," Ashdown said.
A US official familiar with the Ashdown nomination process said the US had consulted with the Afghan government on Ashdown's nomination.
"We only sent Ashdown's name to the UN for official consideration after Karzai had given his blessing to both the person and the mandate," the official said on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue.
Foreign ministers representing NATO countries have discussed combining the roles of the current civilian representatives of the UN, NATO and the EU in Kabul into a single role. British officials had said Ashdown would be ideal because he had respect in world capitals.
The Afghan role would have been more limited than Ashdown's work in Bosnia, where he had sweeping powers. But he might have been too strong a figure for Karzai, whose government is widely seen as weak.
Ashdown said he never sought the kinds of powers he had in Bosnia when negotiating the mandate for the Afghan job.
"If they'd been offered, I would have rejected them," he said. "The government of Afghanistan is a sovereign government, it's a proud nation, President Karzai is its president."
British Foreign Secretary David Miliband expressed regret that Ashdown would not be taking over the expanded international role.
"The UK believes he was well-suited to this important role and would have done an excellent job," Miliband said. "It is now imperative that the UN and the government of Afghanistan work together as quickly as possible to agree a suitable candidate to take on this key role."
Ashdown, once a leader of Britain's opposition Liberal Democrats and a former Royal Marine, was top international administrator in Bosnia from 2002 to 2005.
Ashdown said US officials approached him about the job in October.
KINGPIN: Marset allegedly laundered the proceeds of his drug enterprise by purchasing and sponsoring professional soccer teams and even put himself in the starting lineups Notorious Latin American narco trafficker Sebastian Marset, who eluded police for years, was handed over to US authorities after his arrest on Friday in Bolivia. Marset, a Uruguayan national who was on the US most-wanted list, was passed to agents of the US Drug Enforcement Administration at Santa Cruz airport in Bolivia, then put on a US airplane, Bolivian state television showed. “The arrest and deportation were carried out pursuant to a court order issued by the US justice system,” Bolivian Minister of Government Marco Antonio Oviedo told reporters. The alleged kingpin was arrested in an upscale neighborhood of Santa
ACTIONABLE ADVICE: The majority of chatbots tested provided guidance on weapons, tactics and target selections, with Perplexity and Meta AI deemed to be the least safe From school shootings to synagogue bombings, leading artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots helped researchers plot violent attacks, according to a study published on Wednesday that highlighted the technology’s potential for real-world harm. Researchers from the nonprofit watchdog Center for Countering Digital Hate and CNN posed as 13-year-old boys in the US and Ireland to test 10 chatbots, including ChatGPT, Google Gemini, Perplexity, Deepseek and Meta AI. Eight of the chatbots assisted the make-believe attackers in more than half the responses, providing advice on “locations to target” and “weapons to use” in an attack, the study said. The chatbots had become a “powerful accelerant for
SCANDAL: Other images discovered earlier show Andrew bent over a female and lying across the laps of a number of women, while Mandelson is pictured in his underpants A photograph of former British prince Andrew and veteran politician Peter Mandelson sitting in bathrobes alongside late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein was unearthed on Friday in previously published documents. The image is believed to be the first known photograph of the two men with Epstein. They are currently engulfed in scandal in the UK over their ties to their mutual friend. The undated photograph, first reported by ITV News, shows King Charles III’s disgraced brother and former British ambassador to the US sitting barefoot outside on a wooden deck. They appear to have mugs with a US flag on them
Since the war in the Middle East began nearly two weeks ago, the telephone at Ron Hubbard’s bomb shelter company in Texas has not stopped ringing. Foreign and US clients are rushing to buy his bunkers, seeking refuge in case of air raids, nuclear fallout or apocalypse. With the US and Israel pounding Iran, and Tehran retaliating with strikes across the region, Hubbard has seen demand for his product soar, mostly from Gulf nation customers in Bahrain, Qatar, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates. “You can imagine how many people are thinking: ‘I wish I had a bomb shelter,’” Hubbard, 63, said in
RSS