Javid Ahmad

Javid Ahmad is a senior fellow with the Atlantic Council and a nonresident scholar at the Middle East Institute in Washington, DC, where he focuses on counterterrorism, transregional militancy, digital authoritarianism, and illicit networks. He also serves as an advisory board member at GardaWorld Federal Services, a federal contractor that provides security and risk management services to U.S. government agencies. From 2020-2021, he served as Afghanistan’s ambassador to the United Arab Emirates. Previously, he was a fellow with the Modern War Institute at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, where he provided tailored assessments on insider threats, political risk, and counterterrorism financing issues in South Asia and the Middle East. He has worked with the U.S. defense community, including General Dynamics, where he delivered security and macroeconomic analysis and assessments to U.S. government and business clients. Prior to that, he worked on South Asia-related issues for the Pentagon’s Afghanistan-Pakistan Hands program and the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School, as well as the German Marshall Fund in Washington and the NATO headquarters in Brussels. His writing has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, The New York Times, The National Interest, The Hill, and CNN. He has a BA from Beloit College and an MA from Yale University.