Questions over UN envoy's ties to Pakistan's Zardari: report

[batmannow]

NYTimes.com

U.N. Envoy’s Ties to Pakistani Are Questioned


By HELENE COOPER and MARK MAZZETTI
Published: August 25, 2008

WASHINGTON — 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.
Officially, the United States has remained neutral in the contest to succeed Mr. Musharraf, and there is concern within the State Department that the discussions between Mr. Khalilzad and Mr. Zardari, the widower of Benazir Bhutto, a former prime minister, could leave the impression that the United States is taking sides in Pakistan’s already chaotic internal politics.

Mr. Khalilzad also had a close relationship with Ms. Bhutto, flying with her last summer on a private jet to a policy gathering in Aspen, Colo. Ms. Bhutto was assassinated in Pakistan in December.

The conduct by Mr. Khalilzad, who is Afghan by birth, has also raised hackles because of speculation that he might seek to succeed Hamid Karzai as president of Afghanistan. Mr. Khalilzad, who was the Bush administration’s first ambassador to Afghanistan, has also kept in close contact with Afghan officials, angering William Wood, the current American ambassador, said officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly on the matter of Mr. Khalilzad’s contacts. Mr. Khalilzad has said he has no plans to seek the Afghan presidency.

Through his spokesman, he said he had been friends with Mr. Zardari for years. “Ambassador Khalilzad had planned to meet socially with Zardari during his personal vacation,” said Richard A. Grenell, the spokesman for the United States Mission to the United Nations. “But because Zardari is now a presidential candidate, Ambassador Khalilzad postponed the meeting, after consulting with senior State Department officials and Zardari himself.”
A senior American official said that Mr. Khalilzad had been advised to “stop speaking freely” to Mr. Zardari, and that it was not clear whether he would face any disciplinary action.

In 1979, Andrew Young was forced to resign as the American ambassador to the United Nations over his unauthorized contacts with the Palestine Liberation Organization.
Administration officials described John D. Negroponte, the deputy secretary of state, and Mr. Boucher as angry over the conduct of Mr. Khalilzad because as United Nations ambassador he has no direct responsibility for American relations with Pakistan. Those dealings have been handled principally by Mr. Negroponte, Mr. Boucher and Anne W. Patterson, the American ambassador to Pakistan. Mr. Negroponte previously was the United Nations ambassador, and Ms. Patterson the acting ambassador.
“Why do I have to learn about this from Asif after it’s all set up?” Mr. Boucher wrote in the Aug. 18 message, referring to the planned Dubai meeting with Mr. Zardari. “We have maintained a public line that we are not involved in the politics or the details. We are merely keeping in touch with the parties. Can I say that honestly if you’re providing ‘advice and help’? Please advise and help me so that I understand what’s going on here.”

This is not the first time Mr. Khalilzad has gotten into trouble for unauthorized contacts. In January, White House officials expressed anger about an unauthorized appearance in which Mr. Khalilzad sat beside the Iranian foreign minister at a panel of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. The United States does not have diplomatic relations with Iran, and a request from Mr. Khalilzad to be part of the United States delegation to Davos had been turned down by officials at the State Department and the White House, a senior administration official said.
Richard C. Holbrooke, a former ambassador to the United Nations under President Clinton, said the administration was sending conflicting signals. “It is not possible to conduct coherent foreign policy if senior officials are freelancing,” he said.
It has long been known that Mr. Zardari, who has been locked in a power struggle with Mr. Musharraf and Nawaz Sharif, a former prime minister whose party left the governing coalition on Monday, planned to run for president, administration officials and foreign policy experts said.

“I know that Zardari’s interest in becoming president has been clear for quite some time,” said Teresita C. Schaffer, a Pakistan expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.

The Bush administration has long been uneasy with the idea of Mr. Sharif as a potential leader of Pakistan, and now that Mr. Musharraf is out of the picture, the administration, despite public protestation of neutrality, is seeking another ally.
“It distresses me that the U.S. government has not learned yet that having ‘our guy’ is not a winning strategy in Pakistan,” Ms. Schaffer said. “Whoever ‘our guy’ is isn’t going to be the only guy in town, and if we go into it with that view, we’ll bump up against a lot of other guys in Pakistan.”
A senior Pakistani official said that the relationship between Mr. Khalilzad and Mr. Zardari went back several years, and that the men developed a friendship while Mr. Zardari was spending time in New York with Ms. Bhutto.
The Pakistani official said the consultations between the men were an open exchange of information, with each one giving insight into the political landscape in his capital.
“Mr. Khalilzad, being a political animal, understood the value of reaching out to Pakistan’s political leadership long before the bureaucrats at the State Department realized this would be useful at a future date,” the official said. The ambassador “did not make policy or change policy, he just became an alternate channel,” the official said.

Of Mr. Khalilzad’s Pakistan contacts, Sean I. McCormack, the State Department spokesman, said, “Our very clear policy is that the Pakistanis have to work out any domestic political questions for themselves.” Gordon D. Johndroe, a White House spokesman, said, “The Pakistani elections are an internal matter for the Pakistani people.”

Helene Cooper reported from Washington, and Mark Mazzetti from New York.

 

[fatman17]

duplicate post - kindly merge

 

[batmannow]

duplicate post - kindly merge

sory, sir fatman 17,
i dont have any idea, about... it sir

 

[AgNoStiC MuSliM]

Can't find the other thread.

FM, could you point me to it?

 

[dr.umer]

Can't find the other thread.

FM, could you point me to it?

Sir, its posted here.

 

[fatman17]

AZ and Zalmay Khalilzad will try to implicate the ISI in the afghanistan mess and will do their best to discredit it (as if it isnt enough already) with the tacit approval of the US.

 

[batmannow]

Sir, its posted here.

Dear dr. umer sir,
I guss that, thread was for different veiw on ZARDARI, although it covers many aspects of it, but my thearad is a spotlight on the PPP, ZARDARI + BENAZIR s ultimate participation & conections in a CIA plan.

What ever is happening now, or what ever happened already in pakistan is just, not a another conspiracy theory. from assination of BENAZIR to the ouster of MUSHARAF, there is a web, a international network, which is and was working, playing and manuplating with our politicians, our berucracy, our army to achive its tagets in south asia.

When i started this thearad, my aim was to pin point a littile bit of this dangerous and unhuman westren intelligence satellite mafia.


So, plz let it open for the people who can contribute, and can put more light on the conections between pakistans major and most powerfull peoples and the intelligence mafia of so, called civilized world?
thanks

 

[dr.umer]

Dear dr. umer sir,
I guss that, thread was for different veiw on ZARDARI, although it covers many aspects of it, but my thearad is a spotlight on the PPP, ZARDARI + BENAZIR s ultimate participation & conections in a CIA plan.

What ever is happening now, or what ever happened already in pakistan is just, not a another conspiracy theory. from assination of BENAZIR to the ouster of MUSHARAF, there is a web, a international network, which is and was working, playing and manuplating with our politicians, our berucracy, our army to achive its tagets in south asia.

When i started this thearad, my aim was to pin point a littile bit of this dangerous and unhuman westren intelligence satellite mafia.


So, plz let it open for the people who can contribute, and can put more light on the conections between pakistans major and most powerfull peoples and the intelligence mafia of so, called civilized world?
thanks

Agreed Sir.

 

[Neo]

Questions over UN envoy's ties to Pakistan's Zardari: report​

Tue Aug 26, 2008

WASHINGTON (AFP) - Senior officials in the administration of US President George W. Bush have questioned US ambassador to the United Nations Zalmay Khalilzad over "unauthorized" ties to Pakistan's Asif Ali Zardari, the New York Times reported Tuesday.

US officials, who have insisted on their neutrality in the Pakistan political process, are puzzled and angry over Khalilzad's frequent contact with Zardari, the widower of Benzir Bhutto and a presidential contender, the report said.

Khalilzad had spoken with Zardari by phone "several times a week for the past month until he was confronted about the unauthorized contacts," The Times quoted a senior US official as saying.

According to the text of an email obtained by the newspaper, assistant secretary of state Richard Boucher asked Khalilzad about the nature of his contacts after learning that Khalilzad sought to provide Zardari with "advice and help."

"Can I ask what sort of 'advice and help' you are providing?" the email said. "What sort of channel is this? Government, private, personal?"

Khalilzad, who was a close ally of Bhutto's before she was slain last year, cancelled a meeting with Zardari planned for next Tuesday while he vacations in Dubai, after Boucher learned of his plans, the report said.

"Ambassador Khalilzad had planned to meet socially with Zardari during his personal vacation," US mission to the United Nations spokesman Richard Grenell was quoted as telling the newspaper.

"But because Zardari is now a presidential candidate, Ambassador Khalilzad postponed the meeting, after consulting with senior State Department officials and Zardari himself."

Officials speaking on condition of anonymity told the paper that the behavior by Afghan-born Khalilzad "raised hackles because of speculation he might seek to succeed Hamid Karzai as president of Afghanistan."

 

[dr.umer]

Questions over UN envoy's ties to Pakistan's Zardari: report​

Tue Aug 26, 2008

WASHINGTON (AFP) - Senior officials in the administration of US President George W. Bush have questioned US ambassador to the United Nations Zalmay Khalilzad over "unauthorized" ties to Pakistan's Asif Ali Zardari, the New York Times reported Tuesday.

US officials, who have insisted on their neutrality in the Pakistan political process, are puzzled and angry over Khalilzad's frequent contact with Zardari, the widower of Benzir Bhutto and a presidential contender, the report said.

Khalilzad had spoken with Zardari by phone "several times a week for the past month until he was confronted about the unauthorized contacts," The Times quoted a senior US official as saying.

According to the text of an email obtained by the newspaper, assistant secretary of state Richard Boucher asked Khalilzad about the nature of his contacts after learning that Khalilzad sought to provide Zardari with "advice and help."

"Can I ask what sort of 'advice and help' you are providing?" the email said. "What sort of channel is this? Government, private, personal?"

Khalilzad, who was a close ally of Bhutto's before she was slain last year, cancelled a meeting with Zardari planned for next Tuesday while he vacations in Dubai, after Boucher learned of his plans, the report said.

"Ambassador Khalilzad had planned to meet socially with Zardari during his personal vacation," US mission to the United Nations spokesman Richard Grenell was quoted as telling the newspaper.

"But because Zardari is now a presidential candidate, Ambassador Khalilzad postponed the meeting, after consulting with senior State Department officials and Zardari himself."

Officials speaking on condition of anonymity told the paper that the behavior by Afghan-born Khalilzad "raised hackles because of speculation he might seek to succeed Hamid Karzai as president of Afghanistan."

Sir, it is already posted here.

 

[batmannow]

U.N. Envoy Rebuked For Solo Diplomacy
Ties to Bhutto's Husband Criticized


By Glenn Kessler and Karen DeYoung
Washington Post Staff Writers
Wednesday, August 27, 2008; Page A08


Zalmay Khalilzad, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, was once again scolded by senior State Department officials for diplomatic freelancing, but he appears likely to keep his job in the Bush administration's waning months, U.S. officials said yesterday.
Khalilzad, a voluble, Afghan-born political appointee who previously served as ambassador to Afghanistan and Iraq, was rebuked recently by the senior official for South and Central Asia affairs for planning to give "advice and help" to Asif Ali Zardari, the husband of assassinated former Pakistani prime minister Benazir Bhutto. Zardari has declared himself a candidate to replace Pervez Musharraf as president, a move that thrown the Pakistani government in turmoil. The United States is officially neutral in the Pakistani presidential race.

State Department spokesman Robert A. Wood said yesterday that Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice retains "full confidence" in Khalilzad, who is known as "Zal" in diplomatic circles. Another U.S. official, speaking on condition of anonymity, put it more bluntly: "Zal can do no wrong. The vice president is growing weary of his unpredictability, but the president thinks he's still a rock star."

During his postings in Kabul and Baghdad, Khalilzad won praise for hammering together agreements among divergent political factions. But officials in Washington often complained that he disregarded instructions and left them in the dark about his dealings.


The latest incident came to light when the New York Times yesterday published details of an e-mail from Assistant Secretary of State Richard A. Boucher to Khalilzad regarding his contacts with Zardari.

"I was on the phone today with Asif Zardari and he mentioned that he was going to be in Dubai on September 2 to meet with you. He says you are providing 'advice and help,' " Boucher wrote in the e-mail dated Aug. 18. "Can I ask: What sort of 'advice and help' are you providing?"

Boucher demanded that Khalilzad clarify what "sort of channel" he was opening with Bhutto's husband -- government, private or personal. "We have maintained a public line that we are not involved in the politics or the deals," Boucher wrote. "We are merely keeping in touch with the parties. Can I say that honestly if you're providing 'advice and help?' "

Boucher is a former spokesman for the department and had little expertise in South Asia when Rice named him to the post in 2005, in contrast to Khalilzad's web of contacts in the region. Indeed, Khalilzad has done little to dispel rumors that he is considering running for president of Afghanistan, seeking to oust Hamid Karzai.

U.S. officials said that Boucher and Deputy Secretary John D. Negroponte have repeatedly tripped across Khalilzad's footprints as they try to conduct diplomacy in the region.

The first instance regarding Pakistan occurred last year, when Boucher, during initial negotiations with Bhutto, realized that Khalilzad had been conferring with her and Zardari since the summer of 2006. "He was traveling to London to see them, having dinner with them in New York," said a U.S. official who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was discussing internal disputes.

The contacts gave Bhutto and Zardari leverage over Musharraf and Nawaz Sharif, a Bhutto rival, because they could say a representative of the U.S. president was advising them.
In mid-2007, Negroponte took up the task of delivering a "stern warning" to Khalilzad, saying the department had been "alerted to the existence of a separate channel." Khalilzad said it would stop. Three days later, Khalilzad had dinner with Bhutto, prompting a sarcastic e-mail from Boucher making clear he knew about the dinner.
Meanwhile, U.S. officials in Kabul learned that Khalilzad had put together an informal fundraising and advisory network of wealthy, educated Afghans who had returned home from the United States, Australia, Britain and elsewhere. They met for lunch every Thursday at the Serena Hotel in Kabul to discuss their disdain for Karzai and to plan the nascent Khalilzad presidential campaign. In July, Boucher had to thwart Khalilzad's efforts to attend an Afghan donors conference in Paris, apparently with the intention of undercutting Karzai.

Khalilzad did not respond to requests for comment. "Ambassador Khalilzad had planned to meet socially with Zardari during his personal vacation," Wood said. "But because Zardari is now a presidential candidate, Ambassador Khalilzad postponed the meeting, after consulting with senior State Department officials and Zardari himself."

Who the hell Zalmay Khalilzad, is?

washingtonpost.com

 

[batmannow]

Crises Reveal Limits of Bush's Personal Diplomacy on World Stage


By Michael Abramowitz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, August 27, 2008;

He glimpsed inside Vladimir Putin's soul and found something to his liking. He has also showed off his Texas ranch to Saudi King Abdullah, talked economics with Chinese President Hu Jintao and visited Graceland with then-Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi.

This Story
Crises Reveal Limits of Bush's Personal Diplomacy on World Stage
Ready or Not, Crawford May Soon Resume Normalcy
More than many of his predecessors, President Bush has invested heavily in trying to forge a strong bond with key foreign leaders. But as his term winds down, new crises in Georgia and Pakistan are underscoring the limits of Bush's personal diplomacy, as the president is receiving criticism for overpersonalizing relations with Putin, the Russian prime minister, and with Pervez Musharraf, who resigned as Pakistan's president last week.

Many Russia experts say Bush did not understand the true intentions and character of the Russian leader. "He misjudged Putin," said Stanford University professor Michael A. McFaul, who has been advising Sen. Barack Obama's campaign on Russia policy. From an early date, McFaul said, Putin has had a "very obvious grand strategy for rolling back democracy," but "when new evidence came in to suggest that his initial assessment of Putin was wrong, [Bush] tended to dismiss it."

A different example has emerged in Iraq, where Bush has spent enormous amounts of time with Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, especially via videoconferences, trying to build him up into a true democratic leader, despite some Bush aides' belief that the attempt was a waste of time. The effort might be bearing fruit, to the point that Maliki's growing self-confidence is complicating Bush's efforts to secure a final deal over the future of U.S. military presence in Iraq.

"Maliki is proving to be a more significant leader than most people around Bush thought he could be," said Dennis Ross, a State Department official in the Clinton and George H.W. Bush administrations who advises the Obama campaign. "Last year everyone I talked to in the administration thought that Maliki had to go. Bush didn't seem to buy off on what everyone else was saying."


White House aides say Bush has been aggressive but realistic in his dealings with world leaders. "While there are often policy issues that don't exactly go the way we want them to, the situation on the other hand could be much worse if the president did not have a decent working relationship with some of these leaders," said Gordon Johndroe, spokesman for the National Security Council.

Former secretary of state Henry A. Kissinger disagrees with the common perception that Bush mishandled Putin, saying the president was shrewd early on to give the Russian leader respect and try to draw his cooperation on a range of issues. But the two sides had deep differences on issues such as the U.S. desire to place a missile defense system in Eastern Europe and to expand NATO to Russia's borders.

"There is something that personal relations can add, but there are fundamental national interests that can't be escaped," Kissinger said in an interview. "I promise you, if you ask the Russians, they will give you a long litany of things where they think they have cooperated with us and we haven't given much in return."

Bush is hardly the first president who has sought to deploy his personal political skills to try to bond with foreign leaders and then endure criticism for substituting his personal rapport with them for a hard-headed analysis serving the national interest.

Franklin D. Roosevelt was deemed by adversaries to have been taken in by Soviet leader Joseph Stalin, just as Bush's father was criticized for misreading Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping during the Tiananmen Square crisis of 1989. Bill Clinton came to believe he was double-crossed by Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat in Clinton's unsuccessful drive for a peace deal in the Middle East.

Such episodes notwithstanding, current and former aides said Bush appears to greatly enjoy his contact with foreign counterparts and devotes considerable attention to thinking about how best to connect with them. Perhaps the most successful, from his perspective, was the tie he forged with Tony Blair, who as Britain's prime minister delivered strong backing for the war in Iraq -- to his political detriment. Blair resigned last year.

With Hu, Bush tried early on to move this seemingly colorless Communist Party functionary off his talking points, asking him at one meeting what his biggest challenge was as China's leader, administration officials said. They said the president found Hu's answer sobering: creating 25 million jobs a year. The exchange gave Bush a more sympathetic view of Hu and helped strengthen their relationship, officials said.

National security adviser Stephen J. Hadley said in a recent interview that Bush's strategy of engaging the Chinese leadership more aggressively -- he has met 15 times with Hu or his predecessor -- had proved of great help, especially on diplomacy aimed at halting North Korea's nuclear weapons program. "His notion was, 'I am going to engage the leaders, I'm going to try and empower but also energize the leaders to take some responsibility," Hadley said. "And that's paid dividends, in terms of North Korea."

This Story
Crises Reveal Limits of Bush's Personal Diplomacy on World Stage
Ready or Not, Crawford May Soon Resume Normalcy
By many accounts, Bush has also grown close to Abdullah, rescuing a relationship with Saudi Arabia that got off to a tense start in the months before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, largely over the Saudi leader's belief that Bush had abandoned any sense of balance in his approach to the Israeli-Palestinian dispute.

Relations were cool when Abdullah and his entourage arrived in Crawford, Tex., in April 2002 for a meeting at Bush's ranch. The first several hours of conversation did not go well, said Robert Jordan, who was the U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia at the time and had attended the meeting.

"After a while, we took a break, and the president said, "Why don't we go for a ride in my Jeep," Jordan recalled in an interview in May. Bush and Abdullah toured the ranch, accompanied by only a translator, Jordan added, and "when they came back, they acted like the best of friends. They were beaming."

How much this kind of personal warmth pays off for the United States is a matter of dispute: Some U.S. officials, for instance, remain disappointed with Saudi Arabia's performance in cracking down on the financing of jihadists around the world or with its unwillingness to offer stronger support for the government in Iraq.

Leslie H. Gelb, former president of the Council on Foreign Relations, said Bush is more naive about personal relations with other leaders than past U.S. presidents, alluding to his meeting with Putin in 2001, after which Bush famously said he looked the Russian leader in the eye and got a "sense of his soul."


"The others were far more realistic," Gelb said. "This Bush thinks when he calls Putin, they are soul mates, and when he expresses a desire for Putin to do something, he will do it. [Putin] had other reasons for going into Georgia than the personal relations with the president of the United States."

Another case is Musharraf: Even officials in the administration thought Bush did not push the former president hard enough to crack down on radicals on the Pakistan-Afghanistan border. "Musharraf is charming, funny, quick. . . . They had a great relationship," one former administration official said. "Bush is very good at establishing personal relations, but once he does, he tends to not be willing to take them on in a tough way."
Peter D. Feaver, a former National Security Council aide, dismissed such criticism. "My answer is: What is the alternative? What Pakistani leader was going to be a more reliable ally and better able to secure Pakistani nukes?" Feaver asked. "What we got from Musharraf was better than the Clinton team was able to get and likely better than the next team is likely to get."

 

[batmannow]

US defends Khalilzad
By Our Correspondent

August 27, 2008 Wednesday Sha'aban 24, 1429
DAWN.COM

WASHINGTON: The US State Department on Tuesday publicly defended one of its senior diplomats for communicating with PPP co-chairman Asif Ali Zardari.

Interestingly, spokesman Robert Wood also did not deny the contents of an e-mail from Assistant Secretary Richard Boucher, criticising US ambassador to the UN, Zalmay Khalilzad, for counselling Mr Zardari.

“Ambassador Khalilzad is well-known throughout the region. He has a lot of contacts,” Mr Wood told a regular briefing in Washington.

“He is very well informed about the region. The president (Bush) and secretary (Condoleezza Rice) really do respect and depend on his counsel.”

why ???