Abbie Aryan is currently a Team Leader within The Stabilisation Unit, a UK government post-conflict peace consolidation force of deployable civilian experts jointly funded by the Department for International Development, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, and the Ministry of Defence. From 2007 to 2008, he was a European Commission/IOM-funded Senior Adviser to the Afghan National Government on counter-narcotics issues. He had previously been Chief of Staff at the Afghan Ministry of Counter-Narcotics, Director of the Afghan Eradication Coordination Cell that managed Afghan government oversight of poppy and narcotics eradication efforts throughout the country, and Deputy Director of the Counter-Narcotics Trust Fund in Kabul. Prior to this, he worked as a civil servant in the UK Home Office and as a Legal and Research Officer in HM Courts Service. A British and Afghan national, he read law at Middlesex University and the ELTE University in Budapest, after completing his International Baccalaureate at the French Lycèe Esteqhlal in Kabul between 1979 and 1986. A self-declared “corrupt Afghan official” – on the grounds that Westerners are always hearing about such people, but never actually encounter them – Mr Aryan speaks fluent English, Dari (Farsi and Tajicki), and Pashto, as well as some French and Arabic.

(Current as of April 2010)