After hearing of Condi Rice's admission that the admisistration outed Khan "on background", I immediately wrote a nasty-gram about the Bush administration to the letters editor of my local daily. This still doesn't exonerate the administration, but perhaps they shouldn't be credited with the "scoop" on outing Khan. According to
Salon, Pakistan may have beaten them to the punch.
Reporters initially fingered American officials for leaking Khan's name. National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice all but acknowledged the administration's mistake in an interview with CNN's Wolf Blitzer. The matter was then written off as another blunder caused by the fog of war.
But in fact, U.S. officials did not leak Khan's name. The first leak of Khan's name, according to well-informed, reliable sources in the region who spoke on condition of anonymity, came from Pakistani officials in Islamabad -- who perhaps were motivated by eagerness to show off their success in arresting al-Qaida figures or, more ominously, by a desire to sabotage the penetration of al-Qaida that Khan's arrest had made possible. A second Pakistani leak to Reuters, blaming the Americans as the source of the leak, served to absolve the Pakistanis of any responsibility in breaking up new al-Qaida cells -- an important move domestically.
The Bush administration was hardly in a position to haul Gen. Pervez Musharraf's regime over the coals for this disaster. The United States and Pakistan have a twisted relationship in the hunt for al-Qaida. Although it is ostensibly driven by the mutual desire for security, there is clearly a political element to the relationship related to the survival of both the Bush and the Musharraf governments.