Zalmay Khalilzad is the current
United States Ambassador to the
United Nations. He is the highest ranking
Afghan American or
Muslim in the administration of
George W. Bush. A former professor of political science at
Columbia University, Khalilzad also served as a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations before becoming a
State Department advisor under the
Ronald Reagan administration. He served in various government advisory positions until the
9/11 attacks, after which he became the special envoy to
Afghanistan and then the U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan. He became the official U.S. ambassador to
Iraq on
June 21,
2005 and then the ambassador to the UN on
February 12,
2007. He has written extensively about U.S. foreign policy leadership after the
Cold War.