Professor Ali Ahmad Jalali is a Distinguished Professor at the Near East South Asia Center for Strategic Studies (NESA), National Defense University, Washington, D.C., where he has served since October 2005. He previously served as Afghanistan’s Minister of Interior (January 2003–September 2005), where he built and trained a 50,000-strong Afghan National Police force and a 12,000-strong Border Police force and led nationwide security operations for the 2003 Constitutional Loya Jirga and the 2004 and 2005 national elections. From December 2016 to September 2018, he served as Afghanistan’s Ambassador to Germany, engaging with German and European Union counterparts on bilateral security, economic, trade, and migration matters. Earlier in his career, he held senior executive broadcast positions at the Voice of America (1982–2003), directing Pashto-, Dari-, and Persian-language programming for audiences in Afghanistan, Iran, and Central Asia, and he served two decades in the Afghan National Army (1961–1981), retiring at the rank of colonel. He holds a Master’s degree in Military Science from the Higher Command and Staff School, Kabul (1966), and a Master’s degree with PSC (Higher Command and Staff) from the British Army Staff College, Camberley, England (1967), and pursued graduate studies in comparative politics at the Institute of World Politics/Boston University, Washington, D.C.
A widely published, multilingual military and political analyst with native fluency in English, Pashto, Dari, Persian, and Tajik and professional fluency in Russian, Ambassador Jalali is the author of numerous books and dozens of scholarly articles on the politics, security, and history of Afghanistan, Iran, and Central Asia, published in the United States, Britain, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iran. He has taught and lectured extensively at the U.S. Army War College, the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School, the Command and General Staff College, the British Army Staff College, and the UAE National Defense College, and he is a frequent commentator on Afghan and regional security affairs for CNN, the BBC, NPR, PBS, and other leading international media.
Recent Publications:
“Reflections on the Fateful Collapse of the Afghan National Defense and Security Forces.” In Great Power Competition, Vol. 4: Lessons Learned in the Afghan Conflict (Springer), 2023.
Link: https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-031-22934-3_9
Afghanistan: A Military History from the Ancient Empires to the Great Game. University Press of Kansas, 2021. Link: https://kansaspress.ku.edu/9780700632633/