Timothy Michael Carney (born 1944) is a retired American diplomat and consultant.
Carney was born in Missouri and went on to graduate from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1966. He studied advanced Southeast Asian affairs at Cornell University in 1975-76. Carney joined the Foreign Service in 1967, and was posted in Saigon, South Vietnam during the Tet Offensive. After service in Lesotho, he was then sent to Cambodia, experiencing the Khmer Rouge coming to power in 1975. Other posts included Thailand from the late 1970s to 1980s, South Africa during the crisis over apartheid, and back to the Thai-Cambodia border. In the late 1980s he served in Indonesia.
During the 1990s he cycled through several United Nations positions, serving from 1992 to 1993 as the Director of Information and Education of the UN Transitional Authority in Cambodia, in 1993 as the Special Political Advisor to the Special Representative of the UN Secretary General in Somalia, and in 1994 in the UN Observer Mission in South Africa.
On September 9, 1995 he presented credentials as the U.S. ambassador to Sudan, but was moved to residence in Kenya that following February and commuted to Khartoum for a week each month until his mission was terminated on November 30, 1997.[1] On January 14, 1998 he presented credentials as the ambassador to Haiti, where he served until December 11, 1999.[2]
At other points in his career he was Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for South Asia and was Director for Asian Affairs on the National Security Council Staff.
In 2000 he retired from the Foreign Service and entered consulting, but from after the 2003 invasion of Iraq served as a Senior Adviser at the Ministry of Industry and Minerals in Baghdad from that March through June. In 2005 he was hired temporarily by the State Department to be Chargé d'Affaires in Haiti from August 2005 to February 2006, and then worked briefly as Interim Coordinator for Reconstruction and Stabilization in the Office of the Secretary. He went back to Iraq from February to June 2007 as Coordinator for Economic Transition and was again with the State Department as Head of the Interagency Election Support Team in Kabul from March to November 2009.
Carney currently serves as Executive Vice President of the Clinton Bush Haiti Fund.