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Zalmay Khalizad
In the midst of rampant violence on
the part of insurgents, which confines U.S. officials to a heavily
guarded compound in the so-called Green Zone of Baghdad, Iraq, the
U.S. ambassador to that country, Zalmay Khalilzad, is charged with
the seemingly impossible task of ensuring stability and guiding Iraq
to self-sufficiency in order to allow for the withdrawal of American
troops. Khalilzad’s exceptionally thorough knowledge of Middle
Eastern affairs is perhaps the most important resource for the
reconstruction of Iraq in the wake of the 2003 overthrow of its
leader, Saddam Hussein, by U.S. and coalition forces. A strategic
and scholarly thinker, Khalilzad has had an extensive career as an
adviser for U.S. policies toward the Middle East, dating back to the
Iran-Iraq and Afghan wars in the 1980s. A background figure in the
administrations of the Republican presidents Ronald Reagan and
George H. W. Bush, Khalilzad rose to prominence immediately
following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 and held a
number of high-level government positions, in quick succession, in
the George W. Bush administration: counselor to Secretary of Defense
Donald Rumsfeld, special assistant to President Bush for the Middle
East and Southwest Asia, special envoy to Afghanistan, and U.S.
ambassador to Afghanistan. In the last-named position, Khalilzad
gained the approval of Afghani leaders in large part because he
showed a genuine interest in seeing his native country reestablish
itself as a democracy. His Muslim Pashtun heritage was an especially
welcome commodity among officials of that nation who saw many U.S.
diplomats as being detached from Middle Eastern culture. Much to the
disappointment of the Afghani leadership, on April 5, 2005 President
Bush nominated Khalilzad as ambassador to Iraq.
The mistakes of former U.S. officials
in Iraq who did not understand Middle Eastern culture—Paul Bremer
and John Negroponte—added to the chaos in post-Hussein Iraq; during
their tenures the country moved closer to civil war, as political
infighting among factions increased. To his current post, Khalilzad
“brings a lot more to bear than his predecessors, who knew nothing
about Iraq . . . ,” Khalilzad’s mentor and former colleague at
Columbia University, Zbigniew Brzezinski, told Jon Lee Anderson for
the New Yorker (December 19, 2005). “It was a gutsy decision to put
himself in the line of fire. He is a broad-minded pragmatist and an
insightful strategist. He has a unique advantage in a part of the
world in which the United States has become massively engaged and
does not have many people at the top equipped to deal with it. The
top decision-makers today are ignorant and Manichaean.” With Iraq
divided along ethnic and religious lines, Khalilzad’s main challenge
is to help the nation's various groups to form a viable government
while remaining sensitive to the interests of each faction. At the
same time, he must keep in mind that the volatile political
situation in the Middle East has far-reaching consequences for the
international realm, which could include the continued fostering of
terrorism. Although Khalilzad’s work in Afghanistan and Iraq has
been praised, several policy recommendations he made earlier in his
career have been the targets of criticism, since past U.S. actions
in the Middle East were brought to the public's attention by the
2001 terrorist attacks. Nevertheless, he is widely seen as one of
the American officials best suited to handle the volatility of
Middle Eastern politics in the post-9/11 world.
Zalmay Khalilzad was born on March
22, 1951 in the northern Afghan city of Mazar-i-Sharif. His father,
a Sunni Muslim, worked as a civil servant for the government of King
Zahir Shah in the local office of the Ministry of Finance. His
mother, a Shiite Muslim and a homemaker, was the main caregiver for
Khalilzad and his two brothers and three sisters. When Khalilzad
completed eighth grade, his father moved the family to Kabul, the
capital, where Khalilzad resumed his education at the elite
English-speaking school Ghazi Lycee. He excelled academically and
had become the top student in his class by his sophomore year of
high school. As a result, he was given the chance to participate in
a student-exchange program run by the American Friends Service
Committee, a Quaker charitable organization. In 1966 Khalilzad left
Kabul to spend a year living with an American family on their walnut
ranch in Ceres, California, experiencing a life that was starkly
different from his Muslim upbringing. The subservient maternal
figure who often brought Khalilzad's father and brothers their
slippers was absent from his surrogate family; instead, he witnessed
a partnership between the husband and wife, in which both performed
daily household chores. Khalilzad returned to Afghanistan in 1967
with a new perspective on life and, in particular, gender relations.
He now believed that his mother, who had married at the age of 12
and was illiterate, might have become a great political figure had
she been given the opportunity to pursue an education. “I had
different values, greater interest in sports, a more pragmatic way
of looking at things, and a broader horizon,” Khalilzad told Jon Lee
Anderson. “I had a sense of how backward Afghanistan was. And I
became more interested in how Afghanistan needed to change.”
Upon graduating from high school,
Khalilzad enrolled at Kabul University. In what he described to
Anderson as “a prank,” he and his friends took tests for
scholarships to study at the American University of Beirut, in
Lebanon; to his surprise, he passed and was offered a scholarship.
Khalilzad arrived at American University in 1970 and began studying
political science and the history of the Middle East. There, he met
his future wife, Cheryl Benard, an Austrian-born writer of feminist
novels who was then conducting research on Arab nationalism for her
dissertation. After earning both his bachelor’s and master’s degrees
at American University, Khalilzad left Beirut in 1974, the year
before civil war broke out in Lebanon. The following year he moved
to the U.S. to pursue his doctorate at the University of Chicago, in
Illinois, where he was a student of the military-strategy expert
Albert Wohlstetter. (Wohlstetter is best known for his argument that
the U.S. should gain global dominance by strategic development of
nuclear weaponry, a view that had a profound influence on the
neoconservative political movement). During one lecture, in which
Wohlstetter talked about the “inevitability of war,” Khalilzad
caught his professor's attention by raising his hand and asking
about the “inevitability of permanent peace.” The remark earned
Khalilzad an invitation to attend a small seminar Wohlstetter taught
in his Chicago apartment; the other students included Paul Wolfowitz,
a future deputy secretary of defense in the administration of
President George W. Bush. Khalilzad thrived on the passionate,
in-depth political discussion of the seminar and soon began writing
papers on nuclear proliferation for Pan Heuristics, a think tank
formed by Wohlstetter, which had contracts with the U.S. government.
Khalilzad completed his dissertation on Iran’s nuclear program and
earned his Ph.D. degree in 1979. He accepted a position as an
assistant professor of political science at Columbia University, in
New York City.
In 1984 Khalilzad acquired U.S.
citizenship and was also awarded a fellowship by the Council on
Foreign Relations. At that time, during the decades-long Cold War
between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, U.S. officials feared a
Soviet military victory in Afghanistan; Muslims there had banded
together in a force called the mujahideen to drive the Soviets out
of the country, which they had invaded in 1979. Though Khalilzad had
intended to use his fellowship to work in the area of nuclear
proliferation, President Reagan’s secretary of state, George P.
Shultz, saw Khalilzad’s Afghani heritage as a potential asset for
American interests in both the war between Iran and Iraq and the
Afghan war. Khalilzad was thus named special adviser to the
undersecretary for political affairs in the State Department in
1985, just as President Reagan authorized an increase in weaponry
aid to the mujahideen. With the support of other conservative
policymakers, Khalilzad argued fervently that in order to ensure an
Afghan victory, the U.S. should provide the mujahideen with American
heat-seeking stinger missiles, known to be among the most effective
of antiaircraft weapons. The White House approved the
recommendation, and in 1986 and 1987 approximately 900 stinger
missiles were supplied to the Afghans. The invaluable American
technology helped to bring about the Afghan victory and led to the
Soviet withdrawal, in February 1989. Afterward the U.S.
significantly decreased its financial and military support of
Afghanistan. Even so, at the close of the war, the mujahideen were
left with 200 unused stinger missiles and a large cache of other
arms. In the years following the Soviet pullout, Afghanistan fell
into a civil war that gave rise to the Muslim extremist government
of the Taliban, who were helped to victory by the mujahideen's use
of American-made weapons. After the attacks of September 11, 2001,
it became well-known that the Taliban had allowed Osama bin Laden’s
terrorist organization, Al Qaeda, to establish its base in
Afghanistan. Critics have pointed to Khalilzad’s 1985 recommendation
that the U.S. supply the mujahideen with stinger missiles as having
provided the foundation of the brutal Taliban government and the
springboard for Al Qaeda’s effective terrorist attacks.
After the Soviet withdrawal from
Afghanistan, Khalilzad’s reputation as a strategic political thinker
became well known in U.S. government circles. Still, most officials
dismissed a policy paper he wrote in 1988, calling for a shift in
focus from Iran—with which the U.S. had had an antagonistic
relationship for the past decade—to Iraq. In the paper Khalilzad
staunchly supported a regime change in the latter nation, suggesting
that while Iran had become weaker as its war with Iraq progressed,
Iraq under Saddam Hussein now presented a grave risk to stability in
the Middle East. In 1989 General H. Norman Schwarzkopf, the head of
the U.S. Army’s Central Command, saw value in Khalilzad’s paper and
asked him to lend his expertise to a study assessing the threat
posed by Hussein. The following year Hussein deployed troops to
invade neighboring Kuwait, under the pretense that Kuwait was
threatening Iraq’s oil supplies. Khalilzad’s warnings began to gain
credibility in the State Department, and in 1991 the U.S. launched
the Gulf War to protect American and Kuwaiti interests against Iraq.
Richard B. “Dick” Cheney, then the secretary of defense, invited
Khalilzad to work for the Defense Department. Khalilzad, who at the
time was an associate professor of international affairs at the
University of California at San Diego, accepted the offer and helped
mold the government’s Middle East policies throughout the war. (Khalilzad
was displeased with the war's outcome, in which Hussein was expelled
from Kuwait but remained in power. “I thought, frankly, that we
should have helped the Iraqis get rid of Saddam,” he said to
Anderson.) After the war he remained at the Defense Department as
the assistant undersecretary for policy planning, assessing
America’s position as the only superpower in the post–Cold War era
that followed the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union. He produced a
draft of the Defense Planning Guidance (DPG) of 1992, which argued
that “bipolarity had ended, and the U.S. was now the world’s single
leading power, and that our goal in this new era was to preclude a
return to a bipolar system, or a multipolar system,” as Khalilzad
told Anderson. The document called for using force, if necessary, to
maintain America’s global supremacy. Although the DPG was widely
criticized after it was leaked to the press and was later rewritten
in a less harsh tone, the original draft, according to Anderson, is
“seen as the defining hard-line neoconservative doctrine that
contemplated, among other things, preemptive warfare.” In 1993
Khalilzad left the Department of Defense to join the RAND Corp., a
political think tank. As the group's director of strategy, Khalilzad
founded its Center for Middle Eastern Studies and continued working
with the government, which relied on his expertise to carry out
policy studies for the U.S. military.
In late 2000 Khalilzad returned to
Washington, D.C., as the head of the Pentagon's transition team for
the incoming administration of President George W. Bush. The
following year he was appointed to the National Security Council.
Still, he held relatively little influence in the White House until
September 11, 2001. As it became clear in the days following the
attacks that Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda organization had been
responsible for hijacking the airplanes flown into the World Trade
Center towers, in New York, and the Pentagon building, White House
staffers saw Khalilzad as a much-needed asset in its relations with
Afghanistan, the home base of Al Qaeda. “It was momentous,”
Khalilzad told Anderson. “I realized that we were now going to get
involved in a war and that Afghanistan was the likely theatre. At
that moment, the post–Cold War era was being defined. Afghanistan
was marginal to U.S. interests, and then became very central,
overnight.” Khalilzad’s familiarity with Pashtun culture, his
fluency in both national Afghan languages, Dari and Pashtu, and his
prodemocracy stance with regard to Middle East politics made him the
ideal “go-to” person for the White House as it prepared for an
invasion to depose the Taliban regime and weed out terrorists. He
quickly ascended the administration's ranks, becoming a counselor to
Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and special assistant to the
president on the Middle East and Southwest Asia. When U.S. forces
entered Afghanistan, in October 2001, Khalilzad worked closely with
leaders of the Northern Alliance, a coalition of various Afghan
groups opposing the Taliban, and reported directly to Condoleezza
Rice, then the national security adviser.
Leaders in the U.S. and other
countries were impressed by Khalilzad’s ability to represent U.S.
interests effectively without appearing unsympathetic to those in
the Middle East. “A good negotiator listens to the views that are
expressed and tries to find a sentence—even a single word—that
coincides with the opposite view, and uses that to create a common
ground. [Khalilzad] can do that,” a U.N. official, Lakhdar Brahimi,
told Anderson. Brahimi also noted that Khalilzad has “a unique
capacity to listen.” After the Taliban fell from power, in November
2001, Khalilzad was named special envoy to Afghanistan and worked
with the Northern Alliance and the U.N. to form the transitional
Afghan government, with Hamid Karzai as the acting chairman. By 2003
Khalilzad had made such impressive progress toward the formation of
Afghanistan’s post-Taliban government that President Bush appointed
him as the U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan. Dubbed “viceroy” by
Afghanis, in 2004 Khalilzad helped bring about cooperation among
opposing political factions, resulting in the historic democratic
elections in which Karzai became Afghanistan’s first president.
Relying on faulty intelligence, which
indicated that Iraq held a large cache of weapons of mass
destruction, the U.S. invaded Iraq in March 2003 to depose Saddam
Hussein. In the months preceding the invasion, Khalilzad was also
named the ambassador at large for free Iraqis—in addition to his
diplomatic duties in Afghanistan—and met with pro-American Iraqi
exiles to discuss a strategy for a transitional government. Although
Khalilzad preferred a provisional government that put Iraqis in an
advisory role to occupation forces, the leading Iraqi exiles
staunchly opposed the idea and instead favored an interim government
of Iraqi leaders. Khalilzad listened carefully to the group’s
thoughts and grievances and relayed their concerns to other U.S.
government officials. A sharing of power in the interim government
among leaders of the Kurdish, Sunni, and Shiite populations was
thought to be the best means of avoiding resentment of U.S. forces
and violence among opposing factions. Plans were made to accept the
terms Khalilzad had negotiated at his meetings with Iraqi exiles
before the invasion. But after President Bush named Paul Bremer as
director of the Office for Reconstruction and Humanitarian
Assistance in Iraq, the plans were ignored. After the fall of Saddam
Hussein’s government, the U.N. placed Iraq under a U.S.-British
trusteeship. “We were all angry when we found out,” Adel Abdul Mahdi,
the Shiite vice president of Iraq, told Anderson.
In the two years following the March
2003 invasion, Iraqi politics and security fell into disarray, as
Bremer failed to communicate effectively with Iraqi factional
leaders. His successor, John Negroponte, who was named ambassador to
Iraq in June 2004, similarly failed to understand the intricacies of
Arabic culture and politics, thus further alienating Iraqi leaders.
A series of political missteps by American officials in Iraq
contributed to a rise in violence by insurgents, bringing Iraqi
factions closer to civil war. President Bush, recognizing
Khalilzad’s breadth of knowledge of Middle Eastern affairs and
having seen his effectiveness in Afghanistan, looked to him to quell
the divisive rhetoric among ethnic and religious groups in Iraq and
also to secure a measure of governmental stability. On April 5, 2005
Bush nominated Khalilzad as ambassador to Iraq. President Karzai and
several other Afghani officials pleaded with Washington to keep
Khalilzad in Afghanistan, but the U.S. Congress quickly confirmed
Bush’s nomination, and Khalilzad moved to Baghdad.
Upon arriving in Iraq, in the summer
of 2005, Khalilzad immediately attempted to break the political
stalemate that was stalling an election on an Iraqi constitution.
The Sunni population felt that their interests had been ignored
after the group boycotted the January 2005 election for a
constitutional assembly. Previous U.S. officials in Iraq had had
little sympathy for the Sunni minority’s position and had given
their support to the Shiite religious parties, which won a majority
in the January election. Khalilzad, however, saw that it was
important to bring the Sunnis into the political fold and extended
the constitutional deadline two weeks beyond the planned date of
August 15, 2005 in order to broker a deal with Sunni leaders. He
persuaded Tariq al-Hashemi, the leader of the Sunni-dominated Iraqi
Islamic Party, to support the constitutional draft. The effects of
his negotiating were still felt at the parliamentary election in
December 2005, when Sunni voter participation was at an all-time
high.
The philosophical differences
separating Khalilzad's approach to Iraqi politics from those of his
predecessors account for much of the way the Iraqi government has
evolved since March 2003. According to Peter Galbraith, an informal
adviser to Kurdish leaders during political negotiations, Bremer and
Negroponte failed to understand that Iraq could not become a unified
nation. Deep political, religious, and ethnic divisions rendered
such a notion impractical; Iraqi leaders put more faith in the
possibility of Iraq's consisting of three separate states.
“[Khalilzad] understood quickly that this constitution was more of a
peace treaty than a nation-building exercise, and that what he had
to produce was a road map to avoid a future civil war,” Galbraith
told Anderson. Khalilzad’s familiarity with Middle Eastern social
customs has put Iraqi officials at ease, despite the fact that he
does not speak Arabic fluently. Mahdi told Anderson, “Zalmay . . .
understands the culture here and knows he can invite himself to come
and see us. He’ll drop in and say, ‘Can we have a moment together?,’
knowing that other people will come by, as is our custom, and that
he will be there, and he will discuss things with them, be part of
our discussions.” The cordial personal relationships Khalilzad has
painstakingly established with various political factions have
noticeably diminished Iraqi politicians’ bitterness toward the U.S.
Though diplomatic progress has been made in Iraq since his arrival,
Khalilzad still sees a need for Americans to make a redoubled effort
to understand the complexities of Middle Eastern politics and
culture so that its nations may advance further into the democratic
realm. Addressing the violence that continues to plague Iraq—driven
by the presence of Al Qaeda operatives as well as the Shiite
campaign against Sunnis and Sunni guerrilla warfare against the new
Iraqi government—Khalilzad has hinted that continued unrest could
result in Iraq's being abandoned by the U.S. Iraqis “understand that
the United States could not be counted on to support a kind of
indefinite tribal warfare,” he told Ned Parker for the London Times
(May 31, 2006).
Khalilzad is the author of a number
of books, including The Government of God: Iran's Islamic Republic
(1984), written with his wife, Cheryl Benard; Sources of Conflict in
the 21st Century: Strategic Flashpoints and U.S. Strategy (1998);
and Strategic Appraisal: United States Air and Space Power in the
21st Century (2002), written with Jeremy Shapiro. He received the
King Ghazi Ammanullah Medal, Afghanistan’s highest honor, and,
twice, the Defense Department medal for outstanding public service.
He has published articles and studies in newspapers and political
journals and in more than 200 books. His works have been translated
into Arabic, Chinese, German, Japanese, and Turkish, among other
languages.
Khalilzad divides his time between
Baghdad and his home in Maryland. He and Cheryl Benard have two
sons, Alexander and Max.
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