Ali Ahmad Jalali is an Afghan politician, diplomat, and academic. Jalali served as the Minister of Interior from January 2003 to September 2005. He has also been a distinguished professor at the Near East South Asia Center for Strategic Studies (NESA) at the National Defense University in Washington, D.C. In August 2021, amid the collapse of the US-backed Afghan government, Jalali was rumored to become the leader of the Taliban-controlled interim Afghan government, which he has denied on Twitter as "fake news."
Mohammad Qasim Fahim was a politician in Afghanistan who served as Vice President from June 2002 until December 2004 and from November 2009 until his death. Between September 2001 and December 2004, he also served as Defense Minister under the Afghan Transitional Administration.
Mohammad Ashraf Ghani Ahmadzai is an Afghan politician, academic, and economist who served as President of Afghanistan between September 2014 and August 2021.
The Northern Alliance, officially known as the United Islamic National Front for the Salvation of Afghanistan, was a military alliance of rebel groups that operated between late 1996 to 2001 after the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan (Taliban) took over Kabul. The United Front was originally assembled by key leaders of the Islamic State of Afghanistan, particularly president Burhanuddin Rabbani and former Defense Minister Ahmad Shah Massoud. Initially it included mostly Tajiks but by 2000, leaders of other ethnic groups had joined the Northern Alliance. This included Karim Khalili, Abdul Rashid Dostum, Abdullah Abdullah, Mohammad Mohaqiq, Abdul Qadir, Asif Mohseni, Amrullah Saleh and others.
Professor Abdul Ghafoor Ravan Farhâdi is an Afghan academic and diplomat who served as Afghanistan's Ambassador to the United Nations from 1993 to 2006.
Relations between Afghanistan and the United States began in 1921 under the leaderships of Amanullah Khan and Warren G. Harding, respectively. The first contact between the two nations occurred further back in the 1830s when the first recorded person from the United States explored Afghanistan. The United States began investing some money in landlocked Afghanistan, which ended before the 1978 Saur Revolution. Beginning in 1980, the United States began admitting thousands of Afghan refugees for resettlement, and provided money and weapons to the Mujahideen through Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI).
Said Tayeb Jawad is a politician in Afghanistan. He is currently serving as Ambassador to the Russian Federation. From 2017 to 2020, Jawad served as Ambassador to the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. From December 2003 to September 2010, Jawad served as Ambassador to the United States. He was also the non-resident Ambassador to Mexico, Brazil, Colombia and Argentina. From 2002 to 2003, he was Chief of Staff to President Hamid Karzai.
Francis Joseph Ricciardone Jr. is the current President of the American University in Cairo. Ambassador Ricciardone was the United States ambassador to Turkey between 2011 and 2014. Previously he was Deputy Ambassador at the U.S. Embassy in Kabul, Afghanistan. He was also on leave from the U.S. Department of State as a guest scholar at the U.S. Institute of Peace. He has served as U.S. Ambassador to the Arab Republic of Egypt (2005–2008), the Republic of the Philippines and the Republic of Palau (2002–2005). As a career member of the Senior Foreign Service, he received U.S. government and other organization awards for his work in foreign policy and program management, political reporting and analysis, and peacekeeping.
Zamir Kabulov is a high rank career diplomat and Russian presidential envoy to Afghanistan. He was the Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary of the Russian Federation to the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan until September 21, 2009.
Afghanistan and Canada established diplomatic relations in 1968. In 2003, Canada opened its embassy in Kabul and appointed its first resident ambassador. Afghanistan appointed its first resident ambassador to Canada in 2002. In August 2021, Canada closed its embassy in Kabul with the return of the Taliban to power in Afghanistan.
Abdullah Abdullah is an Afghan politician who led the High Council for National Reconciliation (HCNR), which was expected to lead the intra-Afghan peace talks with the Taliban, from 2020 to 2021. He served as Chief Executive of Afghanistan from September 2014 to March 2020 and as Minister of Foreign Affairs from December 2001 to April 2005. Prior to that he was a senior member of the Northern Alliance, working as an adviser to Ahmad Shah Massoud. He worked as a ophthalmologist and medical doctor in the 1980s.
On 28 January 2010, an International Conference on Afghanistan was held at Lancaster House in London, where members of the international community discussed the further progress on the Petersberg agreement from 2001 on the democratization of Afghanistan after the ousting of the Taliban regime. The one-day conference, hosted by the United Kingdom, the United Nations, and the Afghan government, meant to chart a new course for the future of Afghanistan and brought together foreign ministers and senior representatives from more than 70 countries and international organizations. The conference was attended by the Afghan president Hamid Karzai, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, EU High Representative Catherine Ashton, President of the European Council Herman Van Rompuy, British prime minister Gordon Brown, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon and NATO Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen, as seen at right. Participants also included the Afghan Minister of Foreign Affairs Rangin Dadfar Spanta, UN envoy Kai Eide and the British Foreign Secretary David Miliband, as well former Afghan minister of finance Ashraf Ghani. Afghanistan agreed to timetables to take control of certain military and police functions, and launched a program to lure Taliban insurgents back to mainstream life with financial incentives.
The Quetta Shura was a militant organization which was composed of the leaders of the Afghan Taliban, and believed to be based, since about 2001, within the city of Quetta in the Balochistan province of Pakistan. The Shura was formed at a time after the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan was toppled as part of events occurring during late 2001, the senior leadership at the time, including Mohammed Omar, proceeding to escape into Pakistan.
Waheed Muzdha was a senior Afghan political analyst, writer and a peace activist. He was also a poet and wrote several anti-Soviet poetry during the Soviet Afghan war. He was widely cited by various international newspapers for his views on Afghan conflict. During his career, Muzhda criticized both the Taliban and the Afghan government. Muzhda was praised as a probing intellectual by many journalists and scholars. He was assassinated on 20 November 2019 in Kabul. Several political observers and experts believe that Muzhda was assassinated for his views by pro-government groups as 'a part of campaign to silence people with different views'. Previously, he was reported to have been arrested by Afghan intelligence agency NDS.
Mohammad Shafiq Hamdam is a writer and a political activist in Afghanistan. He was a senior government official in Afghanistan and served as a Deputy Senior Advisor to The President Islamic Republic of Afghanistan, a Senior Analyst/ Advisor to NATO and the Chairman of the Afghan Anti-Corruption Network (AACN).
Mahmoud Saikal, was the Permanent Representative of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan to the United Nations from October 2015 until February 2019. Saikal is a senior Afghan diplomat and an international development specialist with over two decades of experience with governments, international organisations, private sector, and civil society.
Senior leaders of the Afghan Taliban have been stationed in Doha, Qatar, since the early 2010s. The original purpose for being there was to open an office that would facilitate political reconciliation between the Taliban, the government of Afghanistan, the United States and other countries. After the Taliban office building opened in 2013, peace negotiations were suspended following objections by the Afghan government that the office was being presented as the embassy of a government in exile. Taliban leaders remained in Doha with accommodation from the Qatari government, on the condition that the office cannot be used for public dealings.
Hamdullah Mohib is an Afghan politician who served as the National Security Adviser of Afghanistan from 25 August 2018 till 15 August 2021. He served as the Afghan ambassador to the United States from 2015 until August 2018.
Wahidullah Waissi is a career Afghan diplomat. He is now serving as an Ambassador of Islamic Republic of Afghanistan to the Commonwealth of Australia, New Zealand and Republic of Fiji. He worked as Director-General for Economic Cooperation at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Islamic Republic of Afghanistan from 2012 to 2016 overseeing regional economic cooperation and multilateral development partnerships, chaired economic diplomacy committee, coordinated Regional Economic Cooperation Conference for Afghanistan process and projects and served as a Focal Point for economic Confidence Building Measures (CBMs) of the Heart of Asia Istanbul Process.
The Afghan peace process comprises the proposals and negotiations in a bid to end the ongoing war in Afghanistan. Although sporadic efforts have taken place since the war began in 2001, negotiations and the peace movement intensified in 2018 amid talks between the Taliban, which is the main insurgent group fighting against the then-Afghan government and American troops; and the United States, of which thousands of soldiers maintained a presence within the country to support the Afghan government. Besides the United States, major powers such as China, India, Pakistan, Russia, as well as NATO play a part that they see as facilitating the peace process, while the Afghan peace group People's Peace Movement sees regional and global powers as a cause of continued war.
