Friends can be statesmen, but can statesmen be friends?
Zalmay Khalilzad, currently United States Ambassador to the United Nations, has come under fire for engaging in extensive and “unauthorized” contact with Asif Ali Zardari, widower to Benazir Bhutto and Pakistani presidential hopeful. Anonymous officials have told the press that Khalilzad has been making several phone calls a week to Zardari and planned an upcoming meeting between the two. Zardari himself apparently informed other State Department officials that he was receiving “advice and help” from Khalilzad.
The rub is that the United States has adopted an official stance of neutrality in the succession scrum that has taken hold in Pakistan in the wake of Pervez Musharraf’s resignation from Pakistan’s executive office last month. In an e-mail message to Khalilzad (and subsequently leaked to the media), an apparently exasperated Assistant Secretary of State for South Asia Richard A. Boucher complained, “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.”
Khalilzad entered a plea of friendship to the charges. According to the ambassador’s spokesman, the two “planned to meet socially,” not to guide or prepare Zardari for the impending presidential scrum in Pakistan.
Government officials and citizens who maintain informal relationships with foreigners that threaten to compromise national security or America’s strategic interests tend to run afoul of ethical (and legal) scruples associated with treason. Helping a friend at the cost of one’s nation would seem to violate an ethical commitment stemming from the fundamental obligations we hold as citizens, protected and sheltered by a constitutional order.
Assuming for the moment that Khalilzad’s conduct does not threaten American strategic interests, his friendship with Zardari may still be inappropriate.
One approach to understanding Khalilzad’s competing moral obligations, and the conflicts they may engender, is to examine the oath all officers to the United States government are forced to swear:
I, [name], do solemnly swear, (or affirm,) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter. (So help me God.) [The last sentence is optional depending on one’s personal beliefs.]
Even if Khalilzad’s actions do not put the Constitution in harm’s way, the fact that he has flouted America’s public line on Pakistan suggests that he may be in breach of his duty to “bear true faith and allegiance.”
To “bear truth faith” means more than to “keep promises.” In this context, it likely implies an authentic commitment to the spirit of the Constitution. If that were the case, the oath would oblige Khalilzad to behave not merely according to the rules governing his office, but instead to act in accordance with the values that underlie more specific guidelines.
The importance of keeping faith in the case of government officials comes to bear either on cases where there is no particular rule by which to guide conduct or where direct orders from a superior would seem to contradict duties obligated by the Constitution. In these cases, the government officer remains bound by the Constitution and so must use his or her own judgment or discretion.
At the same time, friendship is one of the most common domains in which we rely on faith. The idea that we would turn to laws or regulations for ethical guidance in friendship seems odd. Instead, friends try to arrive at a shared understanding regarding what each owes to the other. What makes Khalilzad’s case curious is the obvious tension between what he may have perceived as obligations owed to his friend Zardari, and those owed to his country.
It might be easy to blame Khalilzad and demand that he keep faith with his country before he keeps faith with his friends. That may be the morally right answer, particularly in the case of an official like Khalilzad who has sworn an oath to his country, a form of consent generally not applied in friendships. Yet Khalilzad would hardly have be the first person to feel the tug of competing priorities and choose friendship over professional and national duty.
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