Senior Afghan aide says sacking unfair, will further destabilise country

A prominent Afghan politician said on Tuesday his dismissal by President Ashraf Ghani was unfair and could further destabilise the country, at a time when the coalition government has already been weakened by divisions and uncertainty over U.S. policy.
Ahmad Zia Massoud, a former vice president, had been serving as Ghani's representative on good governance and reform before he was sacked with little explanation on Monday.
"If the president wants to push me out, the country will end up in another civil war," Massoud told reporters on Tuesday.
"You do not have the power and the right to do this," Massoud said. "Taking me out of the government structure means moving the country to more instability."
The power-sharing agreement brokered by then-U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry looked unwieldy from its inception in 2014, and since then has been buffeted by internal rivalries.
Politicians and analysts say the divisions have hampered the government's ability to lead a country beset by a worsening insurgency, in which thousands of people are killed in fighting between the government and Islamist militant groups like the Taliban. The new U.S. administration has yet to set out a clear policy for Afghanistan, raising questions about how far it will go to support Ghani and his government in the coming years.
Ghani's office said Massoud, who had often publicly criticised the president, had failed to do his job.
But Timor Sharan, a Kabul-based analyst for the International Crisis Group, said the move would reinforce the impression among Ghani's rivals that he was excluding them from power.
"This sends a clear signal to others that they could be easily removed within this strategy of monopolising power around the palace, and this creates the chance of political instability," Sharan said.
RIVAL FACTIONS
Massoud, from Afghanistan's Tajik community, framed his firing as a move by Ghani, a Pashtun from the country's largest ethnic group, to push others away.