 In early January 2007, the Bush administration announced that it was nominating Zalmay Khalilzad, at the time the ambassador to Iraq, to succeed John Bolton as the U.S. representative to the United Nations. Replacing Khalilzad in Iraq would be Ryan Crocker, a veteran diplomat who once opposed the overthrow of Saddam Hussein because of the sectarian strife that would ensue (Washington Post, January 14, 2007). In announcing the nominations, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said: “If confirmed, Ryan and Zal will have two of the hardest and most consequential jobs in the world” (Associated Press, January 8, 2007).
Khalilzad has been a member of the Bush foreign policy team since 2000, when he headed the Bush-Cheney Defense Department transition team. He became an adviser to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and then shifted to the National Security Council, where he worked under Rice. After briefly serving as presidential envoy to Afghanistan, in late 2002 President George W. Bush appointed him “special presidential envoy and ambassador at large for the free Iraqis.” In 2003, he became the ambassador to Afghanistan, a post he held until 2005, when he took over as ambassador to Iraq.
A longtime associate of key hardliners and neoconservatives within the Republican Party, Khalilzad's membership in the U.S. foreign policy elite dates back to the early 1980s, when he was recruited by Paul Wolfowitz to serve on the Reagan administration's State Department policy planning staff. According to author James Mann, Khalilzad was one of a handful of staffers brought on by Wolfowitz to serve on his staff at this time who would go on to form, “over the following two decades, the heart of a new neoconservative network within the foreign policy bureaucracy.” Other members of Wolfowitz's staff at the time included I. Lewis Libby, the former chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney who was indicted for allegedly giving false testimony to the special prosecutor; Francis Fukuyama, the famous author of the end-of-history thesis who eventually turned against his erstwhile ideological brethren in announcing his opposition to the war in Iraq; Alan Keyes, the former presidential candidate and outspoken conservative; and James Roche, an associate of the hardline Center for Security Policy who has served as secretary of both the army and air force in the administration of George W. Bush (Rise of the Vulcans, pp. 112-113).
Although sometimes described as a skillful, moderate diplomat, his numerous policy proposals and support for hardline advocacy efforts over the years seem to belie this characterization. In a New Yorker interview (December 19, 2005), Zbigniew Brzezinksi, President Jimmy Carter's national security adviser, described Khalilzad as a “broad-minded pragmatist and insightful strategist.” But others conclude that Khalilzad's ideology of U.S. supremacy has resulted in a long series of foreign policy disasters. Foreign policy analyst Anatol Lieven said, “If he was in private business rather than government, he would have been sacked long ago” (Independent, January 10, 2002).
A native of Afghanistan, Khalilzad obtained his master's degree at the American University in Beirut. Khalilzad enrolled in the doctorate program at the University of Chicago, where he studied under Albert Wohlstetter, a fiercely anticommunist military strategist who became political mentor to a number of leading neoconservatives, including Khalilzad and Wolfowitz. Wohlstetter believed that a first-strike nuclear weapons doctrine was essential to achieving and maintaining U.S. global dominance—to securing what militarists called a “permanent peace.” Wohlstetter's theory of dominance through U.S. military superiority—and the overwhelming use of force—became a core idea in neoconservative strategic thinking.
While at the University of Chicago, Khalilzad formed lasting political bonds with the likes of Wolfowitz and Ahmed Chalabi, the notorious former leader of the Iraqi National Congress. Khalilzad also worked under Wohlstetter at his Pan Heuristics consulting firm, which had contracts with the State and Defense departments. Khalilzad earned his Ph.D. in 1979 after completing a dissertation on Iran's nuclear program.
Khalilzad joined the Reagan administration after a teaching stint at Columbia University and a one-year fellowship with the State Department sponsored by the Council on Foreign Relations. Khalilzad directed the U.S. effort to provide military, logistical, and humanitarian support to the mujahideen resistance to the Soviet occupation and successfully advocated that these fundamentalist “freedom fighters” receive heat-seeking Stinger missiles—a couple of hundred of which remained in the hands of the Islamist militants and associated warlords after the Soviet Union left Afghanistan. The well-armed mujahideen came back to haunt the United States after many of them joined al-Qaida and the Taliban. In addition to his focus on Iraq, Khalilzad supervised U.S. policy with regard to the Iran-Iraq War (Washington Post, November 23, 2001).
Khalilzad also worked for Wolfowitz when he later served as undersecretary of defense for policy during the last two years of the George H.W. Bush administration. Then-Defense Secretary Cheney tasked Wolfowitz with producing a military strategy for the post-Cold War world. The resulting 1992 draft Defense Planning Guidance (DPG) articulated for the first time a proposed strategy of U.S. global supremacy based on overwhelming U.S. military power. Khalilzad was given the job of doing the actual drafting of the DPG, working in tandem with Wolfowitz and Libby, as well as an outside group of advisers that included Richard Perle and Wohlstetter. The draft guidance, which was toned down after a surge of criticism following a New York Times report on the classified document, outlined a national security strategy that, in hindsight, seems to have served as a blueprint for neoconservative efforts during the 1990s to craft a new rationale for U.S. military activity throughout the globe.
Although the White House rejected the draft, the document had its supporters, as James Mann points out in Rise of the Vulcans. Khalilzad told Mann that Cheney was impressed by the document, allegedly telling Khalilzad: “You've discovered a new rationale for our role in the world” (p. 211). Neoconservatives outside government, like Charles Krauthammer, were also impressed. In a Washington Post column, Krauthammer asked: “What is the alternative? The alternative is Japanese carriers patrolling the Strait of Malacca, and a nuclear Germany dominating Europe” (Mann, p. 211).
Nor did the draft DPG entirely disappear after the White House rejected it. According to Mann, the revised final version produced by Libby merely softened some of the hard edges of the earlier draft while preserving some of its core concepts, such as actively shaping the security environment, acting alone when necessary, and maintaining a dominant edge in military capabilities. Many of the ideas contained in the draft DPG would also be revived repeatedly over the next decade and serve as a broad framework for building a new neoconservative consensus, whose preeminent expression would ultimately arrive in the form of President George W. Bush's 2002 National Security Strategy.
During the Clinton administration Khalilzad was based at the RAND Corporation, where he founded the Center for Greater Middle East Studies and was the director of strategy for the think tank's Project Air Force. Khalilzad also served as board member of the Afghanistan Foundation, which advocated that the Taliban join forces with the anti-Taliban resistance. While at RAND, Khalilzad in 2001 coauthored with Abram Shulsky, a Straussian scholar who headed the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans in the lead-up to the Iraq War, a paper that was entitled “The United States and Asia: New U.S. Strategy and Force Posture.”
Khalilzad's close connections to Islamic extremists in South Asia and to the oil giant Unocal have been the subject of sharp criticism. As Truthout opined in a 2001 piece, “Simply put, Khalilzad's appointment means oil. Oil for the United States. Oil for Unocal, a U.S. company long criticized for doing business in countries with repressive governments and rumored to have close ties to the Department of State and the intelligence community. Zalmay Khalilzad was an adviser for Unocal. In the mid-1990s, while working for the Cambridge Energy Research Associates, Khalilzad conducted risk analyses for Unocal at the time it had signed letters of approval from the Taliban. The analyses were for a proposed 890-mile, $2 billion, 1.9-billion-cubic-feet-per-day natural gas pipeline project that would have extended from Turkmenistan to Pakistan. In December 1997, Khalilzad joined Unocal officials at a reception for an invited Taliban delegation to Texas.”
Despite his connections to the Taliban, which were developed when he aided the Reagan administration's anti-Soviet activities in Afghanistan, Khalilzad quickly changed his tune when Osama bin Laden's connections to the group surfaced.
In 1997 Khalilzad was a charter signatory of the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) founding statement of principles, and he signed two subsequent PNAC letters. A January 1998 PNAC letter to President Bill Clinton, cosigned by Wolfowitz, Perle, Rumsfeld, and Bolton, among others, warned: “We may soon face a threat in the Middle East more serious than any we have known since the end of the Cold War.” The PNAC letter said that the policy of containing Iraq had failed and advocated “removing Saddam Hussein and his regime from power.” Warning that Iraq would almost certainly develop weapons of mass destruction, the PNAC associates concluded: “Although we are fully aware of the dangers and difficulties in implementing this policy, we believe the dangers of failing to do so are far greater.”
Earlier, in 1997, Khalilzad cowrote with Wolfowitz an article for the neoconservative Weekly Standard titled “Overthrow Him,” which called for using military force to overthrow Hussein. They added: “Military force is not enough. It must be part of an overall political strategy that sets as its goal not merely the containment of Saddam but the liberation of Iraq from its tyranny” (quoted in Mann, p. 236).
Immediately prior to joining the George W. Bush administration, Khalilzad codirected RAND's Transition 2001 Panel, which included some 40 foreign policy elites, including a number of influential hawks and neoconservatives. It aimed to provide the winner of the 2000 presidential campaign with a blueprint of priorities on national security policy (for more information, see, “Transition 2001 Update: Bipartisan Panel Offers National Security Action Plan for the President-Elect,” RAND, http://www.rand.org/natsec_area/products/presidentreportupdate.html).
Among the books written or edited by Khalilzad are Strategic Appraisal: The Changing Role of Information in Warfare; United States and Asia: Toward a New U.S. Strategy and Force Structure; Aerospace Power in the 21st Century; and The Government of God: Iran's Islamic Republic, which he coauthored with his wife, Cheryl Bernard. In 1995 Khalilzad wrote “Losing the Moment? The United States and the World after the Cold War,” a Washington Quarterly essay that articulated the need to assert U.S. supremacy in a unipolar world.
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