Rajiv Chandrasekaran is a senior correspondent and associate editor of The Washington Post. Most recently, he is the author of Little America: The War Within the War for Afghanistan, published in June 2012 by Knopf. As part of the Belfer Center's India & South Asia Program's "South Asia Week," he will discuss insights from his coverage of the country and predictions for the withdrawal of international forces in 2014.
From 2009 to 2011, he reported on the war in Afghanistan for The Post, traveling extensively through the southern provinces of Helmand and Kandahar to reveal the impact of President Obama’s decision to double U.S. force levels.
He has served as The Post's national editor and as an assistant managing editor. In 2003 and 2004, he was The Post's bureau chief in Baghdad, where he was responsible for covering the reconstruction of Iraq and supervising a team of Post correspondents. Before the U.S.-led war in Iraq, he was The Post's bureau chief in Cairo. Prior to that assignment, he was The Post’s Southeast Asia correspondent, based in Jakarta, Indonesia. In the months following September 11, 2001, he was part of a team of Post reporters who covered the start of the war in Afghanistan and events in Pakistan.
He also wrote Imperial Life in the Emerald City, a best-selling account of the troubled American effort to reconstruct Iraq. The book, which provides a firsthand view of life inside Baghdad's Green Zone, won the Overseas Press Club book award, the Ron Ridenhour Prize and Britain’s Samuel Johnson Prize. It was named one of the 10 Best Books of 2007 by the New York Times. It also was a finalist for the National Book Award and the New York Public Library's Helen Bernstein Award for Excellence in Journalism.
He has served two terms as a public policy scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington. He also has been the author in residence at the Center for a New American Security and the journalist in residence at the International Reporting Project at the Johns Hopkins School for Advanced International Studies.
He joined The Post in 1994 as a reporter on the Metropolitan staff. He subsequently served as the paper’s Washington-based national technology correspondent. A native of the San Francisco Bay Area, he holds a degree in political science from Stanford University, where he was editor in chief of The Stanford Daily.
