Tariq Ahmed Karim

Tariq Ahmed Karim (born 1942 or 1943) is a Bangladeshi diplomat and former ambassador to the United States and the former High Commissioner to India. He also served as chairman of the Bangladesh Institute of International and Strategic Studies.

Education Karim completed his secondary education at St. Gregory's High School and College in 1960 and higher secondary from Notre Dame College, Dhaka, in 1962.. He earned a BA in English literature in 1965 from the University of Dhaka and started his career. After retirement he received an MA in government and politics from the University of Maryland, College Park, in 2007.

Career Karim joined the Foreign Service of Pakistan in 1967. In March 1972, when he was a second secretary in Tehran, he defected to Bangladesh along with four other embassy personnel. The Bangladeshi Ministry of Foreign Affairs said that in its early years "he played an important role in creating" its personnel and administration departments. He was deputy high commissioner to India from July 1984 to August 1988. From 1988 to 1991, he was deputy chief of mission in Beijing. In 1991, he returned to Iran as ambassador, a post he held until 1995.

Karim joined BRAC University as a visiting fellow in May 2018.

As of June 2025, Karim is an advisor of the Centre for Bay of Bengal Studies (CBoBS) based in the Independent University, Bangladesh.

In January 2021, he joined the Cosmos Foundation, a trustee of the Cosmos Group, as an advisor.

Karim has been a distinguished visiting research fellow at the Institute for South Asian Studies of the National University of Singapore since 2022, and a member of the Board of Advisors of the National Bureau of Asian Research (NBR) of Seattle, WA, and Washington DC since 2021. He has a daughter and two sons.

Entrepreneur Latifur Rahman was Karim's second cousin.