Dr. 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. 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. Between 1993 and 1999, Dr. Khalilzad was Director of the Strategy, Doctrine and Force Structure program for RAND's Project Air Force. While with RAND, he founded the Center for Middle Eastern Studies. From 1979 to 1989, Dr. Khalilzad was an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Columbia University.
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.
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.)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zalmay_KhalilzadOfficial State Depratment Biography: Zalmay KhalilzadAmbassador, Iraq
Term of Appointment: 06/22/2005 to present
Dr. Zalmay Khalilzad was confirmed on June 16, 2005 and sworn in on June 22, 2005 as U.S. Ambassador to Iraq.
Dr. Khalilzad was U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan from 2003 to 2005 and also served as Special Presidential Envoy to Afghanistan. Before becoming Ambassador to Afghanistan, he served at the National Security Council as Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for Islamic Outreach and Southwest Asia Initiatives, and prior to that as Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for Southwest Asia, Near East, and North African Affairs. He also has been a Special Presidential Envoy and Ambassador at Large for the Free Iraqis. Dr. Khalilzad headed the Bush-Cheney transition team for the Department of Defense and has been a Counselor to Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld.
Between 1993 and 1999, Dr. Khalilzad was Director of the Strategy, Doctrine and Force Structure program for RAND's Project Air Force. While with RAND, he founded the Center for Middle Eastern Studies. Between 1991 and 1992, Dr. Khalilzad served as Assistant Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Planning. Then-Secretary of Defense Cheney awarded Dr. Khalilzad the Department of Defense medal for outstanding public service. Dr. Khalilzad also served as a senior political scientist at RAND and an associate professor at the University of California at San Diego in 1989 and 1991. From 1985 to 1989 at the Department of State, Dr. Khalilzad served as Special Advisor to the Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs working policy issues, advising on the Iran-Iraq war and the Soviet war in Afghanistan. From 1979 to 1986, Dr. Khalilzad was an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Columbia University.
Dr. Khalilzad received his bachelor's and master's degree from the American University of Beirut, Lebanon. He went on to earn a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago. Dr. Khalilzad is the author of more than 200 books, articles, studies, and reports. His work has been translated in many languages including Arabic, Chinese, German, Japanese, and Turkish.
http://www.state.gov/r/pa/ei/biog/50305.htmArticle from Tom Paine:Our Newest ProconsulRobert Dreyfuss, June 09, 2005
Excerpt:
In the 1980s, Khalilzad served as a senior State Department official in charge of the Afghan war, and he worked closely with Thomas Goutierre of the University of Nebraska, whose center received CIA, Pentagon and Unocal funding in the 1980s and '90s, in support of the Islamist guerrillas. That, of course, was the U.S.-backed jihad that catapulted Osama bin Laden to prominence and that created a worldwide network of militant Islamist guerrillas schooled in terrorism, including assassinations and car bombings.
In the early 1990s, during the first Bush administration, Khalilzad was hired by his mentor, Paul Wolfowitz, as a defense policy planner. During that era, Khalilzad argued forcefully that the United States ought to build up the Islamic Republic of Iran against Iraq. He also drafted a controversial defense policy paper for Wolfowitz and Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney that called on the United States to exert a hegemonic, post-Cold War strategy of dominance so that "no rival superpower is allowed to emerge in Western Europe, Asia or the territory of the Soviet Union." It also called for a policy of military preemption of emerging threats. In 2003, the twin policies of hegemony and pre-emption combined to result in the invasion of Iraq—and Khalilzad will now have to deal with the unhappy aftermath. In the mid-1990s, Khalilzad was a paid consultant to Unocal, the American oil company that was courting the new Taliban government, and he happily attended receptions for turbaned Taliban dignitaries visiting Texas, Nebraska and Washington. The fact that Khalilzad was part of the coterie of U.S. officials and businessmen who genuflected to the Taliban while seeking U.S. influence in Central Asia's oil and gas industry somehow didn't make it into the official State Department biography of Khalilzad that was distributed at his confirmation hearing. That biography does note that Khalilzad served as a RAND Corporation military strategist from 1993 to 1999.
The impossible task that awaits him in Baghdad is, at least, poetic justice, for it was Khalilzad who helped to champion the forcible regime-change strategy in Iraq beginning in the 1990s. Along with the core of foreign policy radicals and neoconservative strategists, Khalilzad joined the Project for a New American Century to demand, in 1998, that President Clinton shift adopt a policy for "removing Saddam Hussein and his regime from power." Along with Cheney, Wolfowitz et al., Khalilzad was a key architect of the war-on-Iraq policy that seized the Bush administration from its inception in January, 2001. Given all this, it is clear that Khalilzad's appointment is the latest evidence that the Bush administration has no intention of rethinking its Iraq strategy. The United States has only two exit strategies in Iraq: The first is simply to declare victory and get out, and the second is to scrap the current puppet regime, make a deal with the resistance and the Sunni insurgency, and internationalize the oversight of the new government in Baghdad. Khalilzad, of course, will support neither one: he is part and parcel of the failed policy of trying to keep the lid on a growing resistance movement with an occupation army that is not up to the task, and of backing the tenuous, ever more fractious alliance of Shiite religious parties and Kurdish warlords that now purports to control the country. The civil war that looms—whether it is triggered by a Kurdish grab for Kirkuk and Iraq's northern oil fields, or by a Shiite demand for more Islamization of the country, or any one of several other flashpoints—will happen on Khalilzad's watch. The seven-point plan for Iraq that Khalilzad alluded to at his confirmation hearings gave not a hint of fresh thinking.
Yet, aside from some mild grumbling, the Democrats let Khalilzad—and the Bush administration—off the hook at his hearing. Polls show that the American public is teetering on the brink of a wholesale rejection of the Bush-Khalilzad Iraq policy: too many U.S. casualties, too much carnage, and, at $1 billion a week, too much money. Perhaps the Democrats are hoping that the 2006 elections will be run on the old, familiar turf of taxes, Medicare, Social Security and the environment. But as in 2004, they will be mistaken. The issues in 2006 are still likely to be terrorism, Iraq, and national security. Their meekness on challenging one of the architects of the administration's errors in all of those areas is a sign that they still don't get it.Entire article:
http://www.tompaine.com/articles/20050609/our_newest_proconsul.phpTC
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