Bush neocon to seek Afghan presidency

In his time, he has been President Bush's point man in Baghdad, Kabul and the UN, as well as a lobbyist for both the Taliban and international oil companies. He was a member of the powerful consortium Project For A New American Century where he and other US neoconservatives such as Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz and Bill Kristol wrote position papers advancing a US invasion of the Middle East before Sept. 11, 2001. Now Zalmay Khalilzad is preparing to run for the presidency of his native Afghanistan. Representatives of Khalilzad, currently US ambassador to the UN, have discreetly sounded out various factions to ascertain his chances in the election scheduled for 2009. Although the incumbent, Hamid Karzai, is expected to run again, he is increasingly unpopular at home while his Western backers see him as ineffectual against the Taliban. Three meetings have been held with opposition groups in recent months to promote Khalilzad, pictured, as a "unifying" candidate in a country where deep divisions have begun to emerge between the Pashtun communities of the south and the Tajiks, Uzbeks and Hazaras of the north. Khalilzad, a Pashtun, was born in Laghman province in the south-east of the country, but raised in Mazar-i-Sharif in the north. He is on good terms with some former leaders of the Northern Alliance who have split from the Karzai government. Speculation about the 56-year-old Khalilzad's political ambitions sparked into life when he gave a TV interview, saying he was placing himself "at the service of the Afghan people." He was also said to be considering resigning from his post at the UN. The highest-ranking Muslim in the US administration, he was made the effective viceroy of Afghanistan after the 2001 invasion by President Bush before being moved on to Iraq to sort out the mess left by Paul Bremer. Khalilzad is a Rhodes scholar who has spent most of his adult life in the US and has an American wife.