Pakistani-American joins Biden admin

WASHINGTON: Another Pakistani-American has been inducted in the US President-elect Joe Biden's administration, The Washington Post reported.

Salman Ahmed will be joining Biden's foreign policy team as director of policy planning at the State Department. Ahmed previously served as head of strategic planning in Barrack Obama's National Security Council.

He also served as the chief of staff of the US Mission to the United Nations and a senior policy advisor to the US Permanent Representative to the UN. He is the second Pakistan-American to be a part of the Biden administration after Ali Zaidi was appointed climate advisor last month.

He holds a master's degree in international relations from the University of Cambridge, and a bachelor of science in economics from New York University’s Stern School of Business. Ahmed served as a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, where he directed research and led a task force dedicated to making US foreign policy work better for the middle class.

Ahmed has managed complex international security challenges on behalf of the White House, the US Department of State, and the UN for the past twenty-five years. Prior to joining Carnegie, Ahmed served as special assistant to the president and senior director for strategic planning on the National Security Council staff at the White House.

Ahmed also directly supported then secretary of state John Kerry’s negotiations with Russia on Syria between 2013 and 2016. He was the co-chair of the International Ceasefire Task Force in Geneva. Before joining the US Department of State in 2009, Ahmed served as a visiting professor and research scholar at Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, where he taught graduate-level courses on peacekeeping and post-conflict reconstruction.