Ambassador Karl Eikenberry

Ambassador Karl Eikenberry

Ambassador Karl Eikenberry is a former U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan and Lieutenant General, U.S. Army (retired). He is currently a faculty member at Schwarzman College of Tsinghua University in Beijing, China. From 2011-2019, Ambassador Eikenberry served as Director of the U.S.-Asia Security Initiative at the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center at Stanford University.
 
Prior to his arrival at Stanford, he served as U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan from 2009-2011. Before his appointment as chief of mission in Kabul, he retired with the rank of Lieutenant General after a 35-year career in the U.S. Army. Ambassador Eikenberry has also held a variety of policy and political-military positions, including Deputy Chairman of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) Military Committee in Brussels, Belgium; Director for Strategic Planning and Policy for U.S. Pacific Command at Camp Smith, Hawaii; and Assistant Army and later Defense Attaché at the U.S. Embassy in Beijing.  
 
Ambassador Eikenberry is a Fellow at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and serves on the Academy’s Committee on International Security Studies. He is also on the boards of the Centre for Humanitarian Dialogue in Geneva, Switzerland; The Asia Foundation; the Asia Society of Northern California; the National Bureau of Asian Research; and the National Committee on American Foreign Policy.
 
He is a graduate of the U.S. Military Academy, has earned Masters’ degrees from Harvard University in East Asian Studies and from Stanford University in Political Science, and was a National Security Fellow at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.