The Envoy

March 14, 2016
This diplomatic autobiography from the highest-ranking Muslim diplomat in President George W. Bush's administration reflects a mix of subtle, nuanced thinking and apparent disingenuousness. Khalilzad, who was born in Afghanistan, received his doctorate from the University of Chicago, where his adviser told him that in strategic diplomacy, "Mirror imagingâprojecting our way of thinking onto othersâwas a surefire way to misread an opponent." While avoiding that paradigm served him well at the RAND Corporation, think-tank logic ran up against dogmatic policies in the Bush White House after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. The book displays Khalilzad's knowledge and agility as a senior National Security Council staffer who worked on post-Taliban Afghanistan policy and, as of December 2002, served as Bush's "special presidential envoy" to the Iraqi opposition. However, it's difficult to reconcile his accounts of scoring tactical successes with difficult counterparts, such as former Afghan president Hamid Kharzai, with the sorry results of American military intervention and postwar influence in the Middle East. While Khalilzad never directly criticizes Bush, he does suggest that the president's thinking was often simplistic, and his observation that "the United States fell far short of its aspirations in Afghanistan and Iraq" runs counter to the company-man tone otherwise found throughout the book.

January 15, 2016
A Middle East adviser recounts the role of the United States in the region over the past three decades. Former ambassador to Afghanistan, Iraq, and the United Nations, Khalilzad chronicles a long career in international politics. Born in Afghanistan, the author came to America in 1966 as a high school exchange student. Although he first experienced culture shock--he had never seen a shower or an elevator--he quickly acclimated and later leapt at the chance to do graduate work at the University of Chicago. Middle East politics became his field of expertise, and he was pursuing an academic career at Columbia University when the Jimmy Carter administration tapped him to become an adviser on Afghanistan. In 1986, he joined the State Department's Policy Planning Staff under Ronald Reagan. During the George H.W. Bush administration, Khalilzad left government to work at the RAND Corporation, helping to establish a center for Middle East policy studies during his eight-year tenure. Most of this revealing memoir concerns the George W. Bush administration, in which the author worked beginning in May 2001. The author acknowledges the "steep learning curve" facing that administration; no one on the foreign policy team "had a feel for the histories, cultures, and emotions that drove the politics of the broader Muslim world." Khalilzad portrays Bush and Condoleezza Rice as articulate and thoughtful, but he frequently became frustrated by Donald Rumsfeld and by the power struggles among officials at the Pentagon and State Department. In formulating policy for Afghanistan, which was devastated by the Soviet-Afghan War, Khalilzad advised intervention to rebuild the country's institutions to prevent its alignment with extremists. "Afghanistan was our first critical test," he writes, but there, and in Iraq, rivalries, corruption, and a weak sense of civic responsibility, coupled with inconsistent American policy, undermined progress and stability. Critical of Barack Obama, the author advises a strong military presence as the U.S. promotes democratic ideals. A chronological, straightforward, occasionally disturbing history of the challenges leading to the current morass.

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