Javid Ahmad is a nonresident senior fellow with the Atlantic Council’s South Asia Center. He was formerly Afghanistan’s ambassador to the United Arab Emirates. Previously, he was a nonresident fellow with the Modern War Institute at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, where he focused on pressing security, violent extremism, anti-money laundering and counterterrorism financing, and socioeconomic issues in South Asia. Ambassador Ahmad has worked with the U.S. defense community, including General Dynamics, where he provided security, counterterrorism and economic analysis and assessments to U.S. government and business clients on South Asia/Central Asia.  

Prior to that, he worked on South Asia for the Pentagon’s Afghanistan-Pakistan Hands and the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School. He also worked as a program coordinator for Asia for the German Marshall Fund in Washington, a Washington-based think tank, and the NATO headquarters in Brussels. He has also worked on governance issues for organizations in Kabul. Ahmad’s writing has appeared, inter alia, in The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, Foreign Affairs, The New York Times, Foreign Policy, The National Interest, The Hill, and CNN. He has a BA in international relations from Beloit College and an MA in security studies from Yale University.