Dr. Rangin Dadfar Spanta (born 1954 in Herat) was the foreign minister of Afghanistan.

He was appointed to that position by Hamid Karzai during a cabinet reshuffle on March 21, 2006 and approved by the 249-seat lower house on April 20, 2006. He was previously the Senior Advisor on International Affairs to President Hamid Karzai. On January 18, 2010 Zalmai Rassoul became the new foreign minister of Afghanistan.

Spanta was an ex-patriate for many years as he fled during the Soviet invasion of Afghanistanto Turkey. Some years later he moved to Germany claiming to be a refugee. In Germany he became a scholar and assistant professor of political science at RWTH Aachen University, Germany, at which time he also served as spokesperson for the Alliance for Democracy in Afghanistan, and was active in the local section of the German Green Party. During his visits to Afghanistan, upon the fall of the Taliban, he taught briefly at the Kabul University while still being resident in Germany.^[1]

On May 10, 2007, the Wolesi Jirga, the lower house of the bicameral National Assembly of Afghanistan, attempted a vote of no-confidence against Spanta in connection with the plight of Afghan refugees. The effort failed by one vote, but two days later the Wolesi Jirga did succeed in stripping him of his minister status. On June 3, 2007, the Supreme Court of Afghanistan, acting on a request by President Hamid Karzai, declared the second vote illegal and restored Spanta's status as minister. A significant dispute about this issue remains between the Wolesi Jirga and Karzai.

When Karzai presented his list of minister candidates for the new government after the presidential election in 2009, he announced that he would decide on Spanta's post after the International conference on Afghanistan in London on January 28, 2010. On January 9, 2010, when president Karzai presented his second list of candidates to the Wolesi Jirga, he proposed to replace Spanta by the former security advisor Rassoul.^[2][3] Suddenly on January 18, 2010 Mr Rassoul was nominated and accepted by the Kabul parliament as the new foreign minister.

Spanta was one of Karzai's ministers that did not have a reputation for corruption or incompetence, but he could not boast popularity or enjoy tribal followings. However, in December 2009 he was mentioned on a list of corrupt ministers. As a former marxist, he sometimes irritated the American allies of the Karzai administration with his criticism of Western policy in his country.^[4][5]

In January 2010, president Karzai decided to replace Spanta after the International Conference on Afghanistan in London by Zalmai Rassoul. At the London conference, Spanta still represented Afghanistan. Shortly before, he visited the Afghanistan Congress of the German SPD in Berlin,^[6][7][8] where he referred to his background as a peace activist during his time in Germany.

Besides of his mother language Persian, Spanta speaks also Turkish and German and English.

See also

• Waziristan War
• Waziristan accord

References