Yesterday I noted that Karl Eikenberry, the U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan whose cable questioning the Afghan surge was leaked during contentious debates, had hired former New York Times reporter David S. Cloud to be an aide prior to the leakage.

Checking the original story about the leaked cable in the Washington Post, the coincidences get deeper: The lead author of that story is David S. Cloud’s co-author on his recent book.

While it is easy to speculate that the president has Eikenberry’s cable leaked deliberately to diffuse the momentum surrounding McChrystal’s recommendations, that theory is undercut a bit by the fact that the president ultimately embraced the McChrystal recommendations, and more or less discounted the meat of Eikenberry’s recommendation. Occam’s Razor suggests a simpler explanation and solution: If you want to keep your deliberations secret, it’s best not to hire a reporter to be your assistant. And if the recipient of that leak is the reporter-aide’s co-author, ignoring that relationship is akin to the Pentagon issuing a huge study about the Ft. Hood massacre and forgetting to mention the perpetrator’s embrace of radical Islam.