Zalmay
Khalilzad is the highest-ranking
native Afghan and Muslim in the Bush administration. He became George W.
Bush's special envoy to Afghanistan after the fall of the Taliban. He has
been a special envoy to Iraq during the U.S.-led occupation of Iraq. On
September 24, 2003, George W. Bush named Khalilzad the U.S. ambassador to
Afghanistan and he took his post in Kabul on November 27. Currently, Khalilzad is U.S. ambassador to Iraq; he was sworn in on June 21, 2005.
He is a member of the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) and was
one of the signers of the January 26, 1998, PNAC Letter sent to President
William Jefferson Clinton.
An ethnic Pashtun, he was born in the northern city of Mazar-i-Sharif and
first went to the United States as a high school exchange student. Khalilzad
received his doctorate at the University of Chicago, where he studied
closely with strategic thinker Albert Wohlstetter. In the early 1980s, his
team taught a class at the School of International and Public Affairs at
Columbia University with Robert Jervis, currently Adlai Stevenson Professor
of International Affairs there. He joined the State Department as a Council
on Foreign Relations fellow in 1984 and served as a member of the
Department's Policy Planning Council from 1986 to 1988. In 1988 he was by
State Department's special advisor on Afghanistan to Undersecretary of State
Michael H. Armacost.
Khalilzad served under former U.S. Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H. W.
Bush as special assistant to the president for Southwest Asia, the Near East
and North Africa. From 1985 to 1989, Khalilzad served as a senior United
States Department of State official advising on the Soviet war in
Afghanistan and the Iran-Iraq war, and from 1991 to 1992, he was a senior
Defense Department official for policy planning. He served as a counsellor
to Donald Rumsfeld. Khalilzad initially viewed the Taliban as a potential
force for stability and as counter balance to Iran, but his views changed
over time, especially after the events of September 11. Dr. Khalilzad headed
the Bush-Cheney Transition team for the Department of Defense and has been a
Counselor to Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld.
In May 2001, National Security Advisor Dr. Condoleezza Rice announced today
the appointment of Dr. Zalmay Khalilzad as Special Assistant to the
President and Senior Director for Gulf, Southwest Asia and Other Regional
Issues, National Security Council.
Khalilzad was an advisor for the Unocal Corporation. In the mid-1990s, while
working for the Cambridge Energy Research Associates, Khalilzad conducted
risk analyses for Unocal for a proposed 1,400 km (890 mile), $2-billion, 622
m³/s (22,000 ft³/s) natural gas pipeline project which would have extended
from Turkmenistan through Afghanistan to Pakistan. From 1979 to 1989, Dr. Khalilzad was an
Assistant Professor of Political Science at Columbia University.
Dr. Khalilzad holds a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago (1979). He lives
in Maryland with his wife Cheryl Benard and their two children, Alexander
and Max.
On a side note, his writing on the subject of hegemony is somewhat famous in
the academic debate world. (Khalilzad, Zalmay (1995). "Losing the moment?
The United States and the world after the Cold War". The Washington
Quarterly 18:2:03012.)
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The End. July 03 2005