Zalmay Khalilzad’s push to stay relevant after losing Afghanistan

He was America’s point man on Afghanistan, one of the toughest assignments in U.S. diplomacy. Two years after the Taliban seized control, Zalmay Khalilzad is determined not to let U.S. failures there be his legacy.

Khalilzad is both urging Biden administration officials to keep trying to implement the peace deal he negotiated with the Taliban and finding ways to remind people his resume covers more than just Kabul. He has joined the shunned Russian ambassador for a very public meal, opined in newspaper pages on Ukraine policy and jumped headlong into Pakistan’s ugly politics.

The Afghan-born envoy is working on a second memoir and isn’t ruling out a return to government service.

Khalilzad, 72, said in an interview that he’s doing what any person of his stature would do at this stage of life. He’s had a long, varied U.S. diplomatic career, and he still wants to earn a consulting paycheck.

But he’s also an archetype of the Washington creature who thrives on attention and influence, one so determined to, in the D.C. parlance, “stay relevant” that not even an epic failure deters pursuit of glory.

Asked why the debacle in Afghanistan didn’t prompt him to take even a brief step back from the D.C. game, Khalilzad responds with a good-natured laugh, saying he’s sure people have wondered that about him more than once. “As long as I have a mind that works, I will continue to contribute,” he said.

Some Washington stalwarts believe Khalilzad may aspire to reach the ranks of bigwigs such as the late Richard Holbrooke and Henry Kissinger, men with stellar resumes and substantial egos who never lost their desire to wander the diplomatic thickets even after failing to reach some objectives. Kissinger, now 100 years old, recently visited Chinese leader Xi Jinping in Beijing.

“Ambition doesn’t die,” said Vali Nasr, a prominent academic and former U.S. official who dealt with Afghanistan. “All of these diplomats want one big diplomatic accomplishment on their record.”

Khalilzad may still be hunting for that defining moment. After all, Nasr said, “he did not imagine Kabul would end the way it did.”

Still salvaging Afghanistan

Khalilzad was in Doha, Qatar, trying to organize a meeting between the Taliban and Afghan officials to establish a new government when fighters for the insurgent group closed in on Kabul in August 2021.

On Aug. 15, Afghan President Ashraf Ghani fled the country. The Afghan government collapsed, the militants took charge and the 20-year U.S. project in Afghanistan was shattered.

Khalilzad’s first reaction? “Surprised. Very surprised,” he said. He soon found himself helping fellow U.S. officials carry out a chaotic evacuation.

Khalilzad has not given up on Afghanistan in the years since.

He still champions the idea of fully implementing that peace plan, including the parts that call for a pathway to a new Afghan governance system.

Why should the Taliban acquiesce, given that they have all the power now? Khalilzad acknowledges that makes it difficult but points out that the militants could also see sanctions relief and economic aid if they implement the deal.

The Doha accord also is an existing mechanism with international buy-in that the Taliban signed. It’s better than starting from nothing, he says.

“It will be much harder for the Talibs to agree to something new compared to what they have already signed,” said Khalilzad, who also frequently calls on the Taliban to respect human rights, especially for girls and women.

Few issues are as personal for Khalilzad as Afghanistan.

Although he moved to America as a young man, climbing the academic and diplomatic ranks, Afghanistan was his long-suffering homeland. During the George W. Bush years, Khalilzad, a rare high-ranked Muslim-American diplomat, served as U.S. ambassador to his native country, as well as Iraq and the United Nations.

When he joined the Trump administration in 2018 as a special representative for Afghanistan reconciliation, he knew most key players involved in the country, including Ghani. (The two are rumored to have a rivalry that dates to college. Khalilzad insists that’s not true.)

Then-President Donald Trump authorized him to deal directly with the Taliban, who had refused to engage the Afghan government.

The peace accord, reached in February 2020, included a Taliban pledge not to harbor terrorists and a U.S. commitment to gradually withdraw troops. The troop withdrawals were supposed to be contingent on various conditions, including progress in Taliban-Afghan government talks.

But Trump pulled out troops regardless of whether those conditions were being met, and President Joe Biden made clear the U.S. was leaving no matter what. The Taliban, analysts say, realized it didn’t matter what they signed in Doha. They focused on fighting the weakened Afghan forces the Americans left behind, and they won.

Some fellow former national security officials say Khalilzad conceded too much to the Taliban. Some question his judgment in working for the mercurial Trump. Others believe he genuinely wanted to bring peace to Afghanistan, and that his push for the 2020 deal was an attempt to correct earlier wrongs in U.S. policy toward Afghanistan in which he, too, admits he played a role.

Many agree that Trump — and to some extent Biden — undermined the envoy.

Khalilzad is “a hustler, but he’s also a patriot,” said Robin Raphel, a former senior U.S. diplomat with extensive experience in Pakistan and Afghanistan. “He’s a very skilled negotiator. The problem was he didn’t hold many cards, because Trump wanted out.”

Among those who resent Khalilzad most are former Afghan government officials who say he didn’t include them enough in the peace process. (Khalilzad insists he kept them in the loop.)

“I don’t see any repentance in him,” said one former senior Afghan government official, who was granted anonymity for personal security reasons. “That’s what I would like to see — that he repents about how badly he screwed up both for the U.S. and Afghanistan.”

‘Unsolicited advice’

Khalilzad has also focused on an array of fronts beyond Afghanistan in the past two years.

He has spoken about China and other topics at a Goldman Sachs forum and used various forms of media to opine on topics ranging from Japan’s security clearance system to Iran’s application of Islamic law.

He regularly blasts out his writings to people on his WhatsApp list, and he told a reporter to make sure to mention that millions of people see his posts on X, the social media site previously called Twitter.

Russia’s war on Ukraine appears to be a favorite topic, and he is willing to provoke. He began a March 2022 op-ed in the Wall Street Journal with the question: “Will Ukraine become another Afghanistan?”

Perhaps most startling was his public encounter with Anatoly Antonov, Russia’s ambassador to the United States.

The Russian envoy can barely get anyone in Washington to talk to him. But Khalilzad dined with him at Cafe Milano, a restaurant popular with D.C.’s power players. The encounter was spotted and covered by POLITICO.

Khalilzad says he went after being invited by Dimitri Simes, a think-tanker who organized the meal. Khalilzad said he wanted “to understand Russian thinking and strategy. I was in receiving mode.”

Khalilzad has in recent months opined at length on Pakistani politics, bemoaning the arrest of former Prime Minister Imran Khan, saying the army chief (usually the country’s most powerful person) should resign and suggesting the country is falling behind its archrival India.

Such analyses have not always been well received.

Pakistan’s foreign ministry at one point said it doesn’t need “lectures or unsolicited advice.”

One of Khalilzad’s Washington-based contemporaries, Husain Haqqani, a former Pakistani ambassador to the United States, told him to butt out after Khalilzad called for the Pakistani army chief’s resignation. (It was striking because Haqqani has made a career of criticizing the Pakistani military.)

“I would have asked @realzalmayMK to resign but thankfully he has no position to resign from,” Haqqani wrote on X.

Khalilzad is also trying to revive a consultancy, Gryphon Partners, that he previously ran while not in government. He’s not a lobbyist — insisting he’ll never cross that line — but he is a consultant and does some work for a private equity firm he declined to name. He’s encouraging investment in critical minerals, which he called a “new oil.”

Khalilzad’s private business interests often have fueled questions about whether they affect his policymaking. He denies anything inappropriate.

No repentance

Later this month, the Afghanistan War Commission will hold its first official business meeting. Congress has tasked the bipartisan panel with a comprehensive review of America’s 20-year intervention in Afghanistan.

Khalilzad says he’s happy to talk to the panel anytime he’s asked.

He’s likely to wait until Biden is out of office before publishing another memoir, he notes. He hopes that it will add texture and nuance to the picture many draw of him in the wake of Kabul’s collapse.

If he’s asked to return to government service, he will probably say yes, but he concedes that’s not a likely development.

Asked whether he needs to repent, as the Afghan official suggested, Khalilzad grows agitated.

He points to his many past accomplishments in the country, including his roles in writing its past democratic constitution, establishing the American University of Afghanistan and building girls’ schools.

“What did I do wrong that I should show repentance for?” he says. “I have devoted a lot of my life to helping Afghanistan. I care about it deeply.”

Still, reshaping history won’t be simple, some predict.

“The first line in his obituary will be that he presided over the agreement that led to the collapse of Afghanistan. I don’t think there’s any way around that,” said Eric Edelman, a former senior State and Defense department official who worked alongside Khalilzad.

Khalilzad hopes that’s not the case.

“I would like my obituary to say, ‘He was an immigrant to the United States. He embraced the U.S., the U.S. embraced him, and he served to the best of his ability for the security of the United States,” he said.

Megan R. Wilson contributed to this report.