WP: Rumors @ UN that US Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad may run for President... of Afghanistan

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/01/08/AR2008010803845.html

Run for President of Afghanistan? Zalmay, Zalmay Not.

By Al Kamen
Wednesday, January 9, 2008; Page A13

Seems everyone is riveted to news reports about the presidential campaign here. Everyone, that is, except some folks at the United Nations, where persistent chatter has it that Zalmay Khalilzad, our ambassador to the U.N., is also thinking of running for president . . . of Afghanistan.

The Afghan-born Khalilzad, a former Pentagon official, former ambassador to Afghanistan, then to Iraq and now to the U.N., is said to be in the mix for a run, which would probably be in the fall of 2009.

Honest. This is a real rumor. So real that we hear Afghan President Hamid Karzai asked Khalilzad about it when the two met in London back in October. But Khalilzad didn't give a Shermanesque response.

Another U.N. official asked him to say no more definitively, but Khalilzad declined, another official told our colleague Colum Lynch. On Dec. 12, a reporter asked Khalilzad about his "plans after your current job, if you have any."

"Well, I have no particular plan at this time," he replied, other than to leave at the end of the administration and "work in the United States in some job" in the private sector. "As to other plans," he said, "it is only plans in the United States after I finish this job." Which may have been his way of saying he isn't running.