There is something faintly theatrical about the Washington Post’s recent report claiming that a US diplomat in Dhaka openly told Bangladeshi journalists that Washington wants to cultivate relations with Jamaat-e-Islami and views Hefazat-e-Islam through a pragmatic lens. The report is built around alleged audio recordings from a closed-door meeting. It is presented with the authority of quotation marks and the confidence of a paper that has made its reputation by puncturing power. Yet the story collapses the moment one asks a basic question: if an American diplomat had truly said these things, why would the audio ever see the light of day?

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Diplomacy, especially American diplomacy, is not conducted with the recklessness of an open microphone. It is governed by layers of discipline, training, and institutional paranoia. US diplomats are acutely aware that every word they utter in politically sensitive environments can be weaponised. This is particularly true in countries like Bangladesh, where Islamist politics, secular-nationalist anxieties, and great-power rivalries intersect in combustible ways. To imagine a US diplomat casually musing about befriending Jamaat-e-Islami—an organisation with a deeply controversial past—while knowing journalists were present, and then allowing that conversation to be recorded, stretches credulity beyond its limits.

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The Washington Post claims to have obtained audio recordings from a 1 December 2025 meeting. The quoted remarks are striking. Bangladesh, the diplomat allegedly said, has “shifted Islamic”. Jamaat-e-Islami would “do better than it’s ever done before” in the February 2026 election. “We want them to be our friends.”........

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