Foundation for Defense of Democracies

Pakistan has been both an ally of the United States in the war on terror, and a haven for al-Qaeda and Taliban fighters who seek refuge, training and intelligence there. Foundation for Defense of Democracies has hosted a considerable amount of discussion of these issues, particularly in its Leader Thinkers series in 2009.

Pakistan has been both an ally of the United States in the war on terror, and a haven for al-Qaeda and Taliban fighters who seek refuge, training and intelligence there. Foundation for Defense of Democracies has hosted a considerable amount of discussion of these issues, particularly in its Leader Thinkers series in 2009.

Leading Thinkers 2009 brought together some of the premier South Asianists in the world, including Ambassador Wendy Chamberlin, the ambassador of the United States of Pakistan from 2001 to 2002; Ambassador Husain Haqqani, ambassador of Pakistan to the United States, and author of the book Pakistan: Between Mosque and Military; and Ambassador Said Tayeb Jawad, ambassador of Afghanistan to the United States.

The event also featured Dr. Hassan Abbas, author of Pakistan’s Drift into Extremism: Allah, the Army and America’s War on Terror; Dr. Christine Fair, a former political officer to the UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan; Dr. Vanda Felbab-Brown, a Brookings Institution fellow focusing on the national security implications of illicit economies; Stacia George, USAID’s Office of Transition Initiative’s deputy team leader for Asia and the Middle East, a former country representative for the program in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas; Imran Ahmad Khan, the president and co-Founder of the Transnational Crisis Project; Shuja Nawaz, director of the Atlantic Council of the United States’ South Asia Center, and author of Crossed Swords: Pakistan, Its Army, and the Wars Within; Col. Tom Wilhelm (USA, ret.), director of the U.S. Army’s Foreign Military Studies Office (FMSO), and formerly Director of Defense Resources for the Office of Military Cooperation-Afghanistan and the Chief of Ground Forces Liaison to the Pakistani General Staff; and Joshua White, a research fellow at the Institute for Global Engagement and a Ph.D. candidate in South Asia studies at Johns Hopkins SAIS.

Leading Thinkers 2009 was also attended by a number of reporters from the Washington Post and Wall Street Journal.