Afghan crisis: ‘We don’t have any physical money’ says central bank governor

It is deep into the night of Sunday, August 15, and in the hold of a troop transport plane, 8,000 metres above the vast Dasht-e Naomid desert that spans the Iran-Afghanistan frontier, one of the most senior officials of the Afghan government is fashioning a thread of tweets on his iPhone reflecting on the mayhem that he fled hours just earlier in Kabul.

That man is Ajmal Ahmady, the 43-year-old Harvard-educated governor of Da Afghanistan Bank (DAB), Afghanistan’s central bank, nephew-by-marriage of Afghanistan’s ousted president Ashraf Ghani, who himself had fled Kabul in disgrace to the UAE earlier that day as the capital fell – again – to the Taliban after 20 years of western-financed misrule.