Kamal Alam is a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s South Asia Center. He has a special focus on Pakistan’s relationship with Syria, Jordan, and Iraq as well as Pakistan’s relationship with Ahmad Shah Massoud, the legendary Afghan military commander who led military movements against the Soviet Union and the Taliban before he was killed in a terrorist attack in 2001. Alam is a special adviser and representative of the Massoud Foundation in Pakistan which looks at the legacy and work of Ahmad Shah Massoud. He is also the senior advisor to the CEO of the Hoplite Group LLC, a firm specializing in wide range of services including US Special Operations support and US government advisory services. He sits on the international steering group of Afghanistan’s leading horticulture project, Plant for Peace, which provides logistics support to rural Afghan farmers, linking them to markets in the Middle East and the United Kingdom. He was the Pakistan defense fellow at the Royal United Services Institute in London from 2015 to 2019. He has also worked at the Damascus Center for Strategic Studies. He lectures at various military staff colleges in the Arab world with a particular focus on Syrian military history and the relationship between the Pakistani army and the Middle East. For three years he was part of the Pakistani and British armies’ COIN (Stabilization) dialogue looking at the lessons learned on UK-Pakistani defense diplomacy in Afghanistan and the Middle East. He graduated from Durham University with a BA (with honors) in the politics and history of the Middle East and has an MA from Damascus University in Syrian history.