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.