Pakistan’s current envoy to the UN Maleeha Lodhi apparently acted as an informal messenger between the Obama administration and former army chief General Ashfaq Pervez Kayani.
Evidence of this was found in some of Hillary Clinton’s emails, the American media reported on Sunday.
The US State Department released over 1,000 pages of Hillary’s emails when she was the secretary of state and for a while used a private email account and a private server for online communication.
However, the entire message delivered by Maleeha, who has also served on the same deputation in the US and Britain, on behalf of Kayani to the US State Department has been edited out.
“I got a call from Maleeha Lodhi, who is in London. She gave a message from Kayani,” Vali Nasr, who was then a senior adviser in the Office of the Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, wrote on January 21, 2011.
The readout of Kayani’s message through Maleeha — running into two paragraphs — was then sent to Hillary the same day. She asked for the message to be printed on January 30 – three days after Raymond Davis was arrested on charges of killing two men in Lahore. The incident had resulted in a crisis in the US-Pak relationship.
“Please print,” Hillary wrote to her aide Lauren C Jiloty on the email with the subject “latest from Pakistan on Kayani 3.0.”
The emails are being released in phases on the directions of a US court. While most of the portions of the email related to Pakistan have been heavily redacted, it does contain in full the text the phone call between Clinton and former foreign minister Hina Rabbani Khar on July 3, 2012.