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Consultant's Policy Influence Goes Back
to the Reagan Era
Publication: Washington Post
Date: 11/23/2001
Author: Joe Stephens
And David B. Ottaway, Washington Post Staff Writers
Friday, November 23, 2001; Page A4
Four years
ago at a luxury Houston hotel, oil company adviser Zalmay
Khalilzad was chatting pleasantly over dinner with
leaders of Afghanistan's Taliban regime about their
shared enthusiasm for a proposed multibillion-dollar
pipeline deal.
Today, Khalilzad works steps from the White House,
helping President Bush and his closest advisers in
attempts to annihilate those same Afghan officials.
From his perch as a member of the National Security
Council and special assistant to the president, the
Afghanistan native is one of the most influential voices
on Afghan policy.
He is the only White House official to have lived in
Afghanistan, and he has a visceral feel for the region's
tensions and history. His long-term influence on matters
pertaining to Central Asia is made apparent by a photo in
his office in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building.
Snapped next door at the White House, it shows President
Ronald Reagan and Khalilzad huddled in discussion with an
Afghan leader, who at the time was battling to oust the
Soviets.
"Zalmay is the ideal man for Afghanistan, because he
is an Afghan himself and he's grown up there and knows
the country," said Richard Dekmejian, a specialist
in Islamic fundamentalism at the University of Southern
California and an acquaintance for more than a decade.
"He brings firsthand knowledge of the country
together with the perspective of a policy expert. He's at
the right place."
Since the 1980s -- as a Reagan administration policy
planner, a consultant, a Pentagon strategist and a Rand
Corp. scholar -- Khalilzad, a U.S. citizen, has been in
contact with myriad squabbling Afghan warlords and
political leaders.
Over the decades, he has evolved from a Cold War
activist, celebrating the retreat of Soviet forces from
his homeland, to a more moderate voice, calling for
friendly persuasion with the Taliban.
Now, he is a hawk urging the Taliban's
destruction.
His evolving views are evident in a long string of
journal articles, position papers and newspaper columns.
"The Taliban does not
practice the anti-U.S. style of fundamentalism practiced
by Iran," Khalilzad wrote four years ago in The
Washington Post. "We should . . . be willing to
offer recognition and humanitarian assistance and to
promote international economic reconstruction. . . . It
is time for the United States to reengage" the Taliban.
More recently, though, he began stressing that action
against the Taliban
"now is essential."
"The danger is growing," he wrote late last
year with Daniel Byman of the Rand Corp. in Washington
Quarterly, a policy magazine. "Soon the movement
will be too strong to turn away from rogue behavior. It
will gain more influence with insurgents, terrorists and
narcotics traffickers and spread its abusive ideology
throughout the region. . . . Alternatives to
confrontation have little promise."
Khalilzad was born 50 years ago in the northern Afghan
city of Mazar-e Sharif, 70 miles south of the Soviet
border. While still young, his family moved to the
regional capital of Kabul, where his Pashtun father
worked in the government, which was then a monarchy.
"They certainly would have been people among the
intellectual elite of the time," said Thomas E.
Gouttierre, director of the Center for Afghanistan
Studies at the University of Nebraska at Omaha.
"They became Kabuli, the Parisians of Afghanistan:
urbane, urbanized people."
Khalilzad's first glimpse of the United States came as a
teenager, when he visited this country in a student
exchange program run by the American Friends Service
Committee, a Quaker charitable organization, Gouttierre
recalled. Khalilzad went home with a passion for American
culture, including basketball.
"He saw and played basketball while in the
U.S.," said Gouttierre, who coached Khalilzad on a
student team. "As it turned out, he was not a great
player. I knew then he would be a better intellectual
than a basketball player."
After completing high school in Kabul, Khalilzad earned
an undergraduate degree from the American University in
Beirut, followed by a doctorate in political science from
the University of Chicago in 1979 -- the same year the
Soviets invaded his homeland.
For the next decade, Khalilzad was an assistant professor
of political science at Columbia University, also serving
as executive director of the Friends of Afghanistan, a
support group for the Afghan mujaheddin then battling the
Soviets.
From 1985 to 1989, Khalilzad worked at the State
Department as a special adviser to the undersecretary of
state, consulting on the Iran-Iraq War and on the Soviet
war in Afghanistan. He belonged to a small group of
policymakers who successfully pressed the Reagan
administration to provide arms -- including
shoulder-fired Stinger missiles -- to anti-Soviet
resistance fighters in Afghanistan.
He then served as undersecretary of defense in the first
Bush administration while it waged war against Iraq.
Later, he worked as a senior political scientist at Rand,
a consulting company that performs policy studies for the
U.S. military. He directed strategy for Rand's Project
Air Force and founded the corporation's Center for Middle
Eastern Studies.
He also joined the board of the Washington-based
Afghanistan Foundation, a nonprofit corporation dedicated
to raising interest in the country. He became the primary
author of a foundation position paper that urged U.S.
officials to prod the Taliban
and its opposition toward joining forces in a new,
broad-based government.
During the mid 1990s, while at the for-profit Cambridge
Energy Research Associates, Khalilzad conducted risk
analyses for Unocal Corp., a
U.S. oil company that hoped to construct gas and oil
pipelines across Afghanistan. At the time, Unocal held signed business
agreements with the Taliban.
In December 1997, Unocal
brought top Taliban leaders
to the United States to view its operations in Houston.
Khalilzad joined Unocal
officials at a reception for the visiting Taliban delegation. Over
dinner, Khalilzad challenged the leaders on their
treatment of women, whom the Taliban
jailed for failing to cover their faces with veils. His
debate with Amir Khan Muttaqi, Taliban
minister of culture and information, escalated into a
spirited dissection of the precise language of the Koran.
Khalilzad's wife, Cheryl Bernard, is an Austrian writer
and feminist whose novels champion women's rights.
Over the years, Khalilzad has written and edited books
with such titles as "Strategic Appraisal: The
Changing Role of Information in Warfare,"
"United States and Asia: Toward a New U.S. Strategy
and Force Structure" and "Aerospace Power in
the 21st Century." He also co-wrote, with his wife,
"The Government of God: Iran's Islamic
Republic."
After Bush's victory last November, Khalilzad headed the
Bush-Cheney transition team for the Defense Department.
He also counseled Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld.
In his current role, he answers directly to national
security adviser Condoleezza Rice.
"He is scholarly, cool. Always a smile.
Outgoing," Dekmejian said. "He's not a preacher
type, one who goes out there and moves the masses. But he
is very good at addressing small groups of people. He is
not an arrogant government person. He has an open
mind."
Gouttierre said the White House is lucky to have an
expert in diplomacy and military affairs who also has a
gut-level feel for the politics of Afghanistan.
"He's the right kind of a guy at the right place
right now," he said.
For Further Reading: RugNotes
Guide to Rugs & Books
Thanks and best wishes,
J. Barry O'Connell Jr.
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