Hamdullah Mohib

Hamdullah Mohib (Pashto/; born 1983) is an Afghan politician and former diplomat.

Hamdullah Mohib was born in a small village north of Jalalabad in 1983.

He was the youngest of eleven children.

Mohib's father worked in Kabul as a court clerk.

Mohib's family fled Afghanistan during the Soviet war, becoming Afghan refugees.

The family returned home after the end of the Soviet invasion, but fled once more to Pakistan after a renewed civil war broke out.

When Mohib was sixteen years old, his family sent him to London.

He attended community college and then Brunel University, earning a degree in computer systems engineering, with honors.

Upon completion of his degree, Mohib went on to work for Intel Corporation.

After seven years in the UK, Mohib returned to Afghanistan, as director of information technology at the American University of Afghanistan.

Najibullah was Afghan president from 1986 and 1992; he was the last president of the Soviet-backed Democratic Republic of Afghanistan, but turned to Afghan nationalism in his final years.

Najibullah was tortured and killed by the Taliban in 1996.

He remains a divisive and polarizing figure in Afghanistan, reviled by some Afghans due to his association with the Soviet invasion, as well as his brutality as head of the Soviet-supported Afghan secret police, but recalled favorably by some Pashtun nationalists who regarded Najibullah as a patriot and promoter of national reconciliation.

During the 2009 Afghan presidential election, Mohib worked on the campaign of Afghan Finance Minister Ashraf Ghani, who came in fourth place, losing to incumbent President Hamid Karzai.

Mohib then returned to the UK to study for his Ph.D., at Brunel University, in its School of Engineering and Design.

Educated in England, Mohib was deputy chief of staff to Afghan President Ashraf Ghani and simultaneously Ambassador of Afghanistan to the United States from 2014 to 2018.

His thesis was entitled "End-to-end 3D video communication over heterogeneous networks"; he earned his Ph.D. in 2014.

Mohib has been a civil society leader in the Afghan community around the world.

He started the Afghan Students Association of the United Kingdom, Europe's largest Afghan diaspora student organization.

He also formed the Afghan Professionals Network and served as its chairman of the Board (APN).

He founded the think tank "Discourse Afghanistan" as part of APN, and he established community service programming to serve special needs orphans in Kabul and to honor Afghan women's achievements.

In 2014, the same year he received his Ph.D., Mohib became an aide to Ghani, who won the 2014 Afghan presidential election.

After Ghani assumed office, Mohib became his deputy chief of staff; one year later, Mohib was appointed Afghan ambassador to the United States.

He was just 32 years old and had no prior diplomatic experience.

Mohib also simultaneously served as non-resident ambassador to Mexico, the Dominican Republic, Argentina, and Colombia.

During his tenure as the Deputy Chief of Staff to President Ghani, where he Coordinated and oversaw the office of the spokesperson, correspondence and diplomatic communications, protocol and petitions, as well as the Presidential Secretariat.

While at the Presidential Palace, he was responsible for drafting bilateral and multilateral agreements, coordinating with counterparts from the government, and organizing official presidential visits to many other nations.

Mohib led Afghanistan's presidential negotiating team for several intergovernmental cooperation agreements and the development of its "Realizing Self-Reliance'" reform strategy.

Mohib formally presented his credentials as Afghan Ambassador to the United States to U.S. President Barack Obama in September 2015.

During Mohib's tenure as Ambassador, he focused on issues such as women's empowerment and political participation in Afghanistan.

He was then National Security Adviser of Afghanistan from 2018 to 2021, when he fled the country along with Ghani after the 2021 Taliban offensive, just before the collapse of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan and the fall of Kabul.

In August 2018, Ghani appointed Mohib to the post of national security adviser after Mohammad Hanif Atmar abruptly resigned from that post.

At the same time, Ghani declined to accept offers of resignation submitted by Defense Minister Tariq Shah Bahrami, Interior Minister Wais Barmak, and National Directorate of Security chief Mohammed Masoom Stanekzai, over policy differences; Ghani asked the trio to remain in office.

Mohib was initially criticized for being too young and inexperienced for the job.

As national security advisor, he pushed various tribal, political, and ethnic factions to support a united push for peace, saying that a lack of social cohesion and the many Afghan rivalries impaired national security and the prospect of ending the Taliban insurgency.

As one of Ghani's closest aides, Mohib defended Ghani's leadership even as the president's political standing diminished in Kabul and among international allies.

Along with Mohammed Masoom Stanekzai, Mohib was the chief negotiator on Ghani's behalf in 2019 and 2020, during the impasse between Ghani and Abdullah Abdullah in the aftermath of the 2019 Afghan presidential election, in which both Ghani and Abdullah claimed victory and took the oath of office, triggering a political crisis.

The two rivals signed a power-sharing deal in May 2020.

Mohib himself was viewed as a possible future Afghan president.

Over the Eid holidays in May 2020, Mohib visited the gravesite of Mohammad Najibullah in the Melan graveyard in Gardez, eastern province of Paktia.