Karl Eikenberry

Eikenberry graduated from West Point in 1973 and rose to become deputy chairman of the NATO Military Committee in Brussels and commander of the U.S.-led military coalition in Afghanistan from 2005 to 2007. After he retired from the Army in 2009, he plunged into one of the most challenging diplomatic assignments in the world, serving two years as ambassador to Afghanistan under President Obama. He became known as a voice of skepticism about the Afghan government's failings and the deepening U.S. involvement in America's longest war. Then he took a position at Stanford as a distinguished fellow at the Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center. He is a "professor of the practice," a title Stanford bestows on "exceptional practitioners" from business, government or other fields whose path into academia is outside the norm. Eikenberry does not have a doctorate, but he earned a master's degree in East Asian Studies from Harvard University in 1981, and a second master's in political science from Stanford in 1994.