Zalmay Khalilzad

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.