While India makes a bid for a permanent seat at the UN Security Council, it will be watching one US quarter very closely — Shirin Tahir-Kheli, senior advisor to US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. Tahir-Kheli, whose journey to Washington passes through Hyderabad and Pakistan, is counted among the few south Asians in the reckoning in the US echelons of power.Part of Tahir-Kheli’s brief as chief interlocutor on United Nations reforms is evolving US views on expansion of UN Security Council.Tahir-Kheli traces her roots to Hyderabad where she was born in 1944. Her grandfather was a senior minister to the Nizam but the family migrated to Pakistan after Partition. Her father carved out an academic career for himself and rose to become the vice-chancellor of Peshawar University. Tahir-Kheli, however, went to the US as a teenager to study textile design and completed her undergraduate studies from the Ohio Wesleyan University in 1961. Midway, she switched to international relations at the University of Pennsylvania and went on do her masters and doctorate in subject. Her dissertation was on ‘Pakistan Elites and Foreign Policy towards the Soviet Union, Iran and Afghanistan’.Tahir-Kheli soon plunged into academics which kept her busy through the 1970s before she joined the office of the Secretary of State as a policy planner in 1982. Her first brush with India through official channels was during her stint as director for South Asia. She soon went on to become the first Asian ambassador to represent the US at the UN and the first Muslim senior government official appointed by the US President and approved by Senate. Official sources said Tahir-Kheli played an important role in initiating talks on defence issues with India.Tahir-Kheli has also been associated with the Balusa Group, which engages in track-II diplomacy between India and Pakistan. She has written several papers including a couple with the Cooperative Monitoring Center at the Sandia Laboratories, New Mexico. These papers explored ideas in using technology for promoting stability along the Indo-Pak border, many of which have found their way to official agenda today.She was the founding director of the South Asia programme in the Paul Nitze School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University during the presidential tenure of George Bush Sr. His son George W. Bush selected her to be his special assistant besides senior director at the US National Security Council since 2003.
