The fuss over Afghan oil: Afghanistan has finalized its first oil deal in decades -- an agreement with the China National Petroleum Company to develop fields in the northern part of the country. That could make Afghanistan a small oil-exporting country in a few years. Meanwhile, though, there continue to be grumbles from one of the three losing bidders in the tender -- Zalmay Khalilzad, the former U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan, whose private consulting firm, Gryphon Capital Partners, represented the bid of Tethys Petroleum, a U.K.-based oil company. In a series of articles, Khalilzad and his son, Alexander Benard, have criticized the tender process and the Pentagon contractors who helped to write the rules governing it. The Pentagon's Task Force on Business and Stability Operations, Khalilzad asserts, devised the tender in a way that is "slanted toward state-owned foreign competitors" such as CNPC, and against private Western firms such as his client. Khalilzad wrote his most recent piece as a rebuttal to a post on this blog in which I suggested that the essence of his and his son's complaint is not a pro-Chinese slant, but this: sour grapes.

But one set of folks with whom no one has spoken is the target of the Khalilzad family's ire. Not surprisingly, the Pentagon is unhappy with the allegations. "Zal might not like the outcome, and that's his business, but what this shows is that the system worked," one Pentagon official told me. "There are winners and losers in every tender process, and losers are never happy about it. But it is quite another thing to start lobbing allegations about misconduct with nothing to back that up. It's incredibly irresponsible."

Read to the jump for more on the Afghan deal and the rest of the Wrap.

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