Maleeha Lodhi acted as secret messenger for former army chief Kayani

Entire message delivered by Maleeha on behalf of Kayani to the US State Department has been edited out

Pakistan’s current envoy to the UN Maleeha Lodhi apparently acted as an informal messenger between the Obama administration and former army chief Gen Ashfaq Pervez Kayani, some emails of Hillary Clinton indicate.

On Saturday, the US State Department released some 1,000 pages of emails of Hillary when she was the secretary of state and for a while used a private email account and a private server for online communication.



But 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 this 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 of the phone call between Clinton and Pakistan’s then foreign minister Hina Rabbani Khar on July 3, 2012.

Published in The Express Tribune, January 31^st, 2016.