This posting is written after returning tonight from a Hazen Polsky Foundation Asia Society’ President’s Forum, where at the Asia Society’s Headquarters in New York, President Vishakha N. Desai interviews prominent guests on Asian and Asian American Topics. Today we had the United States Permanent Representative to the UN - Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad. The way how this Forum is organized - there is an important guest, and Dr. Desai engages him in a discussion. Then questions are allowed from the floor and also via the internet from people watching the webcast of the live session.

Dr. Khalilzad is an authority on US-West Asia relations and on Asia in General.  Dr. Desai directed her questions mainly on Afghanistan and Iraq. The obvious - Iran and Pakistan issues - came up also - oil did not come up and not really much about the workings of the UN or the US-UN relations. Sure, there were personal questions to the Ambassador who is the highest ranking Muslim in the Administration. Also, he has a very interesting personal history and he will have worked in the Administration through all 8 years of the Bush -43 Presidency. He also worked for Bush -41 and in the Reagan years. We were anxious to ask him about the November - December 2008 Poznan problem about which we wrote several times in the past. I could not place my question in the Q&A time, but was able nevertheless to bring before Dr. Khalilzad my question after the end of the session - and indeed I got an answer that seems a plausible way to go about the US position on the climate change issue, and the reality that there will be a change in the occupancy of the White House in January 2009. Nevertheless - in December 2008 - there will already be a President-in-waiting.  As there is only one President at a time - that could then mean that the important Poznan meeting will become totally irrelevant because of the fact that the US President will indeed be changed within one month, and so will the US attitude to the climate change subject.

My question to the Ambassador was something like this: Mr. Ambassador, my question is about climate change. You, and this Administration will still be here in December, but there will already be a President-elect, and any one of the three possibilities for next Presidency has a different attitude to climate change then this Administration. The important Poznan meeting is in December - how will you deal with the subject in the light of serious policy differences?

The Ambassador said that we have experience with transition teams and we will establish this via a transition team.

I insisted wanting to know if this will have to be done in Washington, and this clearly will not provide for timely guidance, or will you do it here in New York?

To my real surprise - the Ambassador said - “I will do it here - we know how to do it.”

I attach here notes about the persona of Dr. Khalilzad, and we see that he has had experience with transition teams - that is he will be able indeed to establish at the UN such a transition team in order to provide for taking  US new policy to the December Poznan meeting. It is indeed the essence of that meeting - the effort to bring the US on board. Hopefully, whoever wins in November, he or she will appoint without delay  someone to work with the US Mission to the UN in order to prepare the new US position for the Roadway to Copenhagen that goes from the Bali meeting through Poznan - to Copenhagen.

In this posting we do not go over the points that were brought up at the Forum, our only further material is related as said to the persona of Ambassador Khalilzad.

Zalmay Mamozy Khalilzad (Pashto/Persian: زلمی خلیلزاد - Zalmay Khalīlzād) (born: 22 March 1951) is since April 23, 2007, the Permanent United States Representative to the United Nations. He has been involved with U.S. policy makers at the White House since the early 1980s.

An ethnic Pashtun, Khalilzad was born in the city of Mazari Sharif in northern Afghanistan. Khalilzad’s father was a government official under the monarchy of Mohammed Zahir Shah. Zalmay began his education at the private Ghazi Lycée school in Kabul. He came to the United States as a high school exchange student. After one year in te US, he returned for a short while to Kabul, but then switched to the American University in Beirut (AUB), where he learned about the larger Western Asia Region - that according to his own statement - stretches from Morocco to Pakistan.

On April 23, 2007 Dr. Zalmay Khalilzad began as the United States Permanent Representative to the United Nations.

Prior, to his present appointment, Khalilzad served as U.S. Ambassador to Iraq 2005-2007.

From 2003 to 2005, Khalilzad served as the U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan, and also 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. In defending the 2001 U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, Khalilzad said in a February 2002 PBS interview: “We have to think about where Afghanistan has been and where it might have been. Compared to the many years of war involving the Taliban and the Northern Alliance, and prior to that the civil war among various factions that fought against the Soviet Union and the actual war against the Soviet Union, which lasted some ten years, this is - what they have now - is a much better situation. The civil war has ended, Afghanistan has been liberated. There are challenges, clearly, there are security challenges, there are political challenges, there are economic challenges, but these problems that they face now are much smaller, better problems, if you like, to have compared to the problems they had just a few years ago.”

“Mr. Khalilzad, a protégé of Vice President Dick Cheney and Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz, since long before Mr. Bush took office, served as a senior director on the president’s national security council staff during the early years of Mr. Bush’s first term.” After the 2000 elections, Dr. Khalilzad headed the Bush-Cheney transition team for the Department of Defense and has been a Counselor to Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld.

Zalmay Khalilzad served as an adviser to the oil company Unocal, now part of ConocoPhillips, this during the Taliban rule in Afghanistan. While working for the Cambridge Energy Research Associates (CERA) in the mid 1990s, while with RAND Corporation, Khalilzad conducted risk analyses for Unocal for a proposed 1,400 Km (890-mile), $2-billion, 1.9-billion-cubic-feet-per-day natural gas pipeline project which would have extended from Turkmenistan through Afghanistan to Pakistan - a Trans-Afghanistan gas pipeline project. He acted as a special liaison between UNOCAL and the Taliban regime.

In 2001, President George W. Bush asked Khalilzad to head the Bush-Cheney transition team for the Department of Defense and Khalilzad briefly served as Counselor to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. In May 2001, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice announced the Khalilzad’s appointment as Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for Southwest Asia, Near East, and North African Affairs at the National Security Council. In December 2002 the President appointed Khalilzad to the position of Ambassador at Large for Free Iraqis with the task of coordinating “preparations for a post-Saddam Hussein Iraq.”

After the terrorist attacks of 9/11, President Bush came to rely on Khalilzad’s Afghanistan expertise. Khalilzad was involved in the early stages of planning to overthrow the Taliban and on December 31st 2001 was selected as Bush’s Special Presidential Envoy for Afghanistan. He served in that position until November of 2003, when he was appointed to serve as U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan.

Khalilzad held the position of U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan from November 2003 until June 2005. During this time, he oversaw the drafting of Afghanistan’s constitution, was involved with the country’s first elections, and helped to organize the first meeting of Afghanistan’s parliament (the Loya Jirga). It was rumored by some that Afghan President Hamid Karzai was very reliant on Khalilzad’s guidance. During 2004 and 2005 he was also involved in helping with the establishment of the American University of Afghanistan (AUAF), which is the first western-style higher learning educational institution in Afghanistan.

Should a Republican win the 2008 Presidential Election, Khalilzad is widely speculated to be a leading candidate to become Secretary of State.

He is one of the original members of Project for the New American Century (PNAC) and was a signatory of the letter to President Bill Clinton sent on January 26, 1998, which called for him to accept the aim of “removing Saddam Hussein and his regime from power” using “a full complement of diplomatic, political and military efforts.”

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. \

Khalilzad first visited the United States as a high school exchange student, through an American Field Service program. He lived for a year with a family, and attended Ceres High School, near Modesto, the wine country, the San Ioaquin Valley, California.

He received his bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the American University of Beirut, Lebanon. He went on to earn a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago, where he studied closely with strategic thinker Albert Wohlstetter - a mathematician and mentor to Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz.

Between 1993 and 1999, Dr. Khalilzad was Director of the Strategy, Doctrine and Force Structure, for RAND Corporation’s Project Air Force. While with RAND, he helped found RAND’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies as well as “Strategic Appraisal,” a periodic RAND publication. He also authored several influential monographs, including “The United States and a Rising China” and “From Containment to Global Leadership? America and the World After the Cold War.”

While at RAND, Khalilzad also had a brief stint consulting for Cambridge Energy Research Associates, which at the time was conducting a risk analysis for Unocal, now part of ConocoPhillips, 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 to Afghanistan and further proceeding to Pakistan. He acted Trans-Afghanistan gas pipeline project.

In 1997, Khalilzad “joined Unocal officials at a reception for an invited Taliban delegation to Texas.”

“Just as oil industry conflicts of interest have not been a concern for the Bush administration in its appointments, Khalilzad’s historic support for the Taliban seems not to be either,” wrote the environmental, anti-mining group Project Underground of Khalilzad’s ambassadorship. “Even as the Clinton administration was beginning to recognize the repressive nature of the Taliban regime and its links to [Osama] bin Laden, Khalilzad called for U.S. engagement with the Taliban. ‘The Taliban do not practice the anti-US style of fundamentalism practiced by Iran,’ wrote Khalilzad. ‘We should … be willing to offer recognition and humanitarian assistance and to promote international economic reconstruction. It is time for the United States to re-engage.’”
Between 1991 and 1992, under President George H. W. Bush, Dr. Khalilzad served as 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 served as a senior political scientist at RAND in 1989 and 1991. Here he was Director of the Strategy, Doctrine and Force Structure program for the U.S. Department of Defense think tank - the RAND Corporation’s Project Air Force, 1993-99, Founder, Center for Middle Eastern Studies, and Associate Professor at the University of California at San Diego. He was also Executive Director, Friends of Afghanistan, “a support group for the mujaheddins fighting the Soviets.” The group was part of a $500,000 U.S. Information Agency “public relations campaign intended to bring [the Afghan] struggle against Soviet troops to the world’s attention.”

Khalilzad is one of the original members of the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) (the only Muslim and non-native born American original member) and was a signatory of the letter to President Bill Clinton sent on January 26, 1998, which called for him to accept the aim of “removing Saddam Hussein and his regime from power” using “a full complement of diplomatic, political and military efforts.”

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 in President Ronald Reagan’s Administration as a senior State Department official advising on the Soviet war in Afghanistan and the Iran-Iraq war. During this 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.

From 1979 to 1986, Dr. Khalilzad was an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Columbia University, where he worked with Zbigniew Brzezinski.

Dr. Khalilzad is the author of more than 200 books, articles, studies, and reports.