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Zalmay Khalilzad: ‘I Will Reflect’ on What U.S. Could Have Done Differently

America’s man in Afghanistan reflects on Trump’s ill-fated peace deal, the pullout, and how everything went wrong.

By , a columnist at Foreign Policy and an adjunct professor at American University’s School of International Service.
Zalmay Khalilzad, special representative for Afghanistan reconciliation, speaks.
Zalmay Khalilzad, special representative for Afghanistan reconciliation, speaks.
Zalmay Khalilzad, special representative for Afghanistan reconciliation at the State Department, testifies in a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing on U.S. policy in Afghanistan on Capitol Hill in Washington on April 27. T.J. Kirkpatrick/Pool/Getty Images

Leaving Afghanistan

No U.S. official has been more closely associated with the United States’ 20-year involvement in Afghanistan—and its inglorious end—than Zalmay Khalilzad. An Afghan native, born in Mazar-i-Sharif and raised in Kabul, Khalilzad first came to the United States as a high school exchange student, studied at the University of Chicago, and rose to the upper echelons of the Republican foreign-policy establishment. 

Elise Labott is a columnist at Foreign Policy and an adjunct professor at American University’s School of International Service. As a correspondent for CNN for two decades, she covered seven secretaries of state and reported from more than 80 countries. Twitter: @EliseLabott

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