Khalilzad Off The Reservation

By Cernig

I'll try to write more about this in the morning but wow. The New York Times has "leaked" emails:

Zalmay Khalilzad, the American ambassador to the United Nations, is facing angry questions from other senior Bush administration officials over what they describe as unauthorized contacts with Asif Ali Zardari, a contender to succeed Pervez Musharraf as president of Pakistan.

Mr. Khalilzad had spoken by telephone with Mr. Zardari, the leader of the Pakistan Peoples Party, several times a week for the past month until he was confronted about the unauthorized contacts, a senior United States official said. Other officials said Mr. Khalilzad had planned to meet with Mr. Zardari privately next Tuesday while on vacation in Dubai, in a session that was canceled only after Richard A. Boucher, the assistant secretary of state for South Asia, learned from Mr. Zardari himself that the ambassador was providing �advice and help.�

�Can I ask what sort of �advice and help� you are providing?� Mr. Boucher wrote in an angry e-mail message to Mr. Khalilzad. �What sort of channel is this? Governmental, private, personnel?� Copies of the message were sent to others at the highest levels of the State Department; the message was provided to The New York Times by an administration official who had received a copy.

Khalilzad, a neocon from way back who was a signatory to PNAC letters and who was originally very friendly with the Taliban (even taking Taliban officials to dinner in Houston) admits to being a long-time friend with Zardari, who has gained the epithet "Mr Ten per Cent" even in Pakistan's incredibly corrupt political circles. Khalilzhad has also been suspected of having his eye on the Afghan president's chair, something he's strenuously denied.

The conspiracy theorists will be going nuts, and probably rightly so.