Rajiv Chandrasekaran

Senior Correspondent and Associate Editor, Washington Post

Rajiv Chandrasekaran is a senior correspondent and associate editor of the Washington Post.

He is the author of Little America: The War Within the War for Afghanistan (Knopf, 2012). 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 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.

Mr. Chandrasekaran also wrote Imperial Life in the Emerald City, a bestselling account of the troubled U.S. 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 ten 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.

Mr. Chandrasekaran 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.