Years before Zalmay Khalilzad served as America’s emissary to the war zones of Afghanistan and Iraq, he had become adept at straddling countries and cultures. Born in 1951 to a provincial official in Afghanistan, he made his first trip to America as a high-school exchange student in 1966 and when he arrived in his New York hotel was briefly stymied by the Western shower faucets. He learned fast, became an American citizen in 1984 and by early 2001 had a job on the National Security Council as the top staffer for the Middle East. This made him the highest-ranking Muslim in the administration of President George W. Bush.
Then came the Sept. 11, 2001, al Qaeda attacks on the United States. Mr. Bush dispatched Mr. Khalilzad to serve as a special envoy to Afghanistan and as chief interlocutor with the Iraqi opposition; then he entrusted him with a series of vital ambassadorships, first to post-Taliban Afghanistan (2003-05), then to post-Saddam Iraq (2005-07) and finally to the United Nations in New York (2007-09).
In his postings to Kabul and Baghdad, Mr. Khalilzad served on the diplomatic front lines of U.S. efforts to replace terror-spawning Islamic tyrannies with benign, democratic governments. In both countries, he wrestled hands-on with some of the toughest foreign-policy questions of our time. What follows regime change? How can a functional and free polity be built out of the ruins of an overthrown tyranny? What part should America play?
These are the main themes of Mr. Khalilzad’s memoir, “The Envoy: From Kabul to the White House, My Journey Through a Turbulent World.” In practice, Mr. Khalilzad was more than an envoy. He was a kind of backroom power broker who was trying to help engender the new governments to which he was the ambassador. It was a complex business, and out of it Mr. Khalilzad provides a richly argued case for such lessons as: “Do not assume that local politics will take care of themselves in the aftermath of regime change.”
Originally published in the Wall Street Journal
Ms. Rosett, a Foreign Policy Fellow with the Independent Women’s Forum, a columnist of Forbes and a blogger for PJMedia, is a contributing editor of The New York Sun.
