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April 2, 2001
Council on Foreign Relations
April 2, 2001, New York, NY—Major General (Ret.) William Nash has been named Senior Fellow and Acting Director of the Council on Foreign Relations’ Center for Preventive Action (CPA), Council President Leslie H. Gelb announced today. “Bill Nash is one of the few Americans to have led both civilian and military peacekeeping operations,” said Mr. Gelb. “He has not only thought about how to prevent conflict, but has actually done it.”
In 2000, at the request of the U.S. government, Nash became the regional administrator for the United Nations in northern Kosovo. Prior to going to Kosovo, he was the Director, Civil-Military Programs at the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs in Washington, D.C. When he retired from the Army in 1998, he became a Fellow and Visiting Lecturer at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government.
Nash was commanding general of the United States Army’s 1st Armored Division from 1995-97. In 1996, he commanded Task Force Eagle, a multinational division of 25,000 soldiers from 12 nations charged with enforcing the military provisions of the Dayton Peace Accords in northeastern Bosnia-Herzegovina. Nash was a platoon leader in Vietnam and an armored brigade commander in Operation Desert Storm.
The CPA was established in 1994 to study and test conflict prevention. It proceeds with the belief that many of today's most serious international problems—ethnic conflicts, failing states, and humanitarian disasters—could be averted or ameliorated with effective early attention and action. The Center’s first project under Nash will be a roundtable series in New York and Washington, D.C., focusing on the current situation in and around Kosovo.
The CPA’s advisory board is chaired by General John W. Vessey; Reynold Levy is the Vice Chair. The board includes former government officials such as Morton I. Abramowitz and Strobe Talbott, former military leaders such as General George Joulwan, heads of human rights organizations such as Kenneth Roth, and other leaders in the conflict prevention arena such as David A. Hamburg, Jane Holl Lute, Vincent A. Mai, and Barnett Rubin.
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