Zalmay Khalilzad
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Dr. Zalmay M. Khalilzad (Persian:زلمی خلیزاد) (born 22 March 1951) is an American diplomat, and is currently the highest-ranking native Afghan and Muslim in the administration of U.S. President George W. Bush. He is the U.S. Ambassador to Iraq, having been sworn in on June 21, 2005. On Dec 4, 2006, it was announced that Khalilzad planned to leave his post to be replaced by Ryan Crocker, the current ambassador to Pakistan.
Khalilzad's previous assignment was as the U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan. On December 4, 2006, Bloomberg reported that Khalilzad will soon be leaving his post in Iraq, possibly to replace John Bolton as the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations.
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 Bill Clinton. Khalilzad is also a former board member of Friends of Afghanistan, which received extensive U.S. funding.
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[edit] Early history, education and personal life
An ethnic Pashtun, he was born in the city of Mazari Sharif, in northern Afghanistan. He began his education at the private Ghazi Lycée school in Kabul. He emigrated to the United States as a high school exchange student, but attained his bachelor's and master's degrees from the American University of Beirut, Lebanon. Khalilzad received his doctorate at the University of Chicago, where he studied closely with strategic thinker Albert Wohlstetter, who is a prominent nuclear deterrence thinker and an opponent to the disarmament treaties.
From 1979 to 1989, Dr. Khalilzad was an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs. During this time he worked closely with Zbigniew Brzezinski, the Carter administration's architect of the policy supporting the Afghan Mujahadeen resistance to the Soviet Union's invasion of Afghanistan.
His wife, Cheryl Benard, is a political analyst with the RAND Corporation. They have two children, Alexander and Maximilian.
Zal plays a mean game of pick-up basketball.
[edit] Career history
In 1984 Khalilzad accepted a one-year Council on Foreign Relations fellowship to join the State Department, where he worked for Paul Wolfowitz, then the director of Policy Planning.
From 1985 to 1989, Khalilzad served as a senior State Department official advising on the Soviet war in Afghanistan and the Iran-Iraq war, during which time he was the State Department's Special Advisor on Afghanistan to Undersecretary of State Michael H. Armacost. In this role he developed and guided the international program to promote the merits of a Mujahideen-led Afghanistan to oust the Soviet occupation. 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 1991 to 1992, he was a senior Defense Department official for policy planning. 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 September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.
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) Trans-Afghanistan gas pipeline project which would have extended from Turkmenistan through Afghanistan to Pakistan. For this project, he met a delegation of Taliban in the United States. Between 1993 and 1999, Dr. Khalilzad was Director of the Strategy, Doctrine and Force Structure program for the RAND Corporation's Project Air Force. RAND is a think-tank primarily focused on "national security" issues, created just after World War II in connection with high ranking officers from the armed forces and now closely linked to the neoconservatives (Donald Rumsfeld was chairman 1981-1986). While with RAND, he founded the Center for Middle Eastern Studies. Khalilzad co-authored the RAND study, "The United States and a Rising China".
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 Condoleezza Rice announced the appointment of Khalilzad as Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for Gulf, Southwest Asia and Other Regional Issues, National Security Council.
[edit] Time as an Ambassador
Khalilzad has served as U.S. Ambassador to Iraq in a time where the United States military is involved in the Iraq War.
Following the December 2005 Iraqi legislative elections, Khalilzad played a substantial role in bringing together Shiites, Sunnis, and Kurds to form the current Iraqi government.
After the Al Askari shrine bombing in February 2006 he warned that spreading sectarian violence might lead to a civil war in post-invasion Iraq and possibly even neighbouring countries. [1]
[edit] Writing on U.S. leadership
Khalilzad wrote several articles on the subject of the value of U.S. global leadership in the mid-90's. The specific scenarios for conflict he envisioned in the case of a decline in American power have made his writings extremely popular in the world of competitive high school and college policy debate.
- Khalilzad, Zalmay (1995). "Losing the moment? The United States and the world after the Cold War". The Washington Quarterly 18:2: 03012.
[edit] Possible UN Ambassador
As of December 4, 2006, the date of resignation of UN Ambassador John Bolton, Zalmay Khalilzad has been named as a possible replacement.
[edit] External links
- U.S. Embassy Baghdad, Iraq: About the Ambassador
- Khalilzad profile in The New Yorker
- Profile of Khalilzad, RightWeb
- Profile of Khalilzad, SourceWatch
- Profile: Khalilzad, The Center for Cooperative Research
- RAND transition 2001 panel members, The RAND Corporation
- Zalmay Khalilzad's campaign contributions
- Critique of RAND
- Khalilzad's high school basketball career
- Afghan Roots Keep Adviser Firmly in the Inner Circle - more basketball mentions
| Preceded by Robert Finn |
United States Ambassador to Afghanistan 2003–2005 |
Succeeded by Ronald E. Neumann |
| Preceded by John Negroponte |
United States Ambassador to Iraq 2005–present |
Succeeded by – |
