Asia Society in New York

Last week, Asia Society had to delay the press preview for its Mariko Mori show after "typhoon conditions" delayed the Japanese artist's arrival in New York. Five days later, the Upper East Side museum has happier news to report: its exhibition of Buddhist art from Pakistan, delayed for six months because of political turmoil in that country, is going forward.

Asia Society director Melissa Chiu told The New York Times today that anti-Americanism in Pakistan after the killing of Osama bin Laden caused delays in arranging loans for the show, which had already suffering setbacks following the death of U.S. diplomat Richard Holbrooke, who had been assisting with logistics.

State Department warnings about Americans traveling to Pakistan also hindered matters, but the museum eventually hired a German company to crate works and secured visas for Pakistanis to bring the works to the U.S. through Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's office.

The exhibition, "The Buddhist Heritage of Pakistan," opens Aug. 9.

By the end of the weekend, Mr. Urbahn, 27, had become a minor celebrity in the media storm that surrounded the killing of Osama bin Laden in Pakistan, and his Twitter feed had jumped from a few hundred followers to nearly 7,000—and counting.

The reason for his newfound fame was a 140-character message that Mr. Urbahn typed out on his BlackBerry, amid the mad speculation over what President Barack Obama was going to say in a surprise news conference on Sunday evening.

“So I’m told by a reputable person they have killed Osama Bin Laden,” he wrote. “Hot damn.”

Mr. Urbahn, a top aide to former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld and an intelligence officer in the Navy Reserve, had moments earlier been lying in bed alongside his wife, taking a rare evening off from the endless news crush to watch the NHL playoffs. (His previous tweet, from an hour before, read: “[Washington Capitals left winger Alex] Ovechkin defines clutch. Unbelievable goal to tie it up w #Caps goalie pulled. Heading to OT now.”)

As reporters—still foggy from the White House Correspondents Dinner parties that had stretched into the wee hours—scrambled to figure out the subject of the news conference, Mr. Urbahn fielded a call from what he only described as a “connected network TV news producer” who asked him to be put in touch with Mr. Rumsfeld for an on-air interview. Bin Laden, it seemed, had been killed, and the network wanted reaction.

Mr. Urbahn waved off the request—it was too premature—and turned on the news, where there were still shots of the White House and network anchors who seemed to know very little about what was to come.

“I mentioned it offhand to my wife, and just threw it down on Twitter thinking there surely have to be a couple of dozen other people who have heard the same rumor and thought of [doing] the same thing,” he told The Observer.

“But apparently not. The tweet went viral and it was off to the races at that point.”

Indeed it was. Mr. Urbahn’s tweet was read and retweeted by some of his friends in D.C.’s  young right-wing policy-maker circles, and then a few more, before it was read by Brian Stelter, the hyperactive New York Times TV reporter, who then sent it out to his 54,000 followers, just as the social media site was undergoing an unprecedented crush, with more than 5,000 messages being sent every second.

“I had no idea who he was. He just popped up on my Twitter feed,” Mr. Stelter told The Observer. “There was a lot of guessing about bin Laden but no one wanted to say it out loud. He allowed people to take that idea seriously.”

Mr. Urbahn is careful to say: “I’m not a journalist. I was watching the news; they were very careful not to report things that were rumor or single-sourced, and that was the right thing to do.” But he knows his way around a newsroom, and has some experience with the way that lone scribblings can ricochet around the Internet. As an undergraduate columnist for the Yale Daily News, Mr. Urbahn earned a degree of blog notoriety for a piece titled “Radical Un-chic: Think Before You Wear,” which decried the uptick of Marxist paraphernalia on campus.

“In casually walking around campus Monday and Tuesday, I saw no fewer than three pre-frosh wearing T-shirts emblazoned with Che Guevara’s pensive black and white face; another proudly sported the Soviet hammer and sickle,” he wrote. “While hardly evidence of a Red invasion of the Yale campus, the approval of communist [sic] emblems as acceptable pop culture icons is nothing short of disturbing.”

A summa cum laude in religious studies, Mr. Urbahn is remembered from his days around New Haven as an earnest and unapologetic motorcycle-riding conservative—a rarity on a campus where, according to one classmate of Mr. Urbahn’s, transvestites outnumber Republicans. After an internship with the Department of Defense, he was hired by Mr. Rumsfeld’s office. He survived a brief interregnum on Capitol Hill after his boss was sacked, then returned to Mr. Rumsfeld’s orbit when the former secretary set up the Rumsfeld Foundation on M Street in downtown D.C. He helped Mr. Rumsfeld write his memoirs, Known and Unknown—the book debuted at No. 1 on the New York Times best-seller list, before falling from sight a few weeks later—at which point, FishbowlDC named him one of the capital’s “Hottest Media Types.” He is now safely settled down with his wife, Kristen, of Louisville, Ky. (Mr. Urbahn graduated high school in New Canaan, Conn.)

In Mr. Rumsfeld’s office, he developed a reputation as a fierce defender of his boss. He once criticized the Pulitzer Committee for honoring the New York Times for a piece that smeared Mr. Rumsfeld. “Does the Pulitzer give prizes for works of fiction?” he said. “Perhaps they just got the wrong category.” He also took shots at luminaries like Sy Hersh and Bob Woodward for what he deemed biased and inaccurate reporting.

(After Mr. Woodward wrote a harsh review of Mr. Rumsfeld’s memoir, Mr. Urbahn sent out a statement which read, “The well known story about Bob Woodward is that he practices what is derided as ‘access journalism,’ whereby he favors those who provide him with information and gossip and leak against their colleagues. Those who refuse to play along, such as Donald Rumsfeld, then pay the price.”)

Before his famous tweet went out Sunday night, official Washington had been in a kind of frenetic standstill. Cheryl Bolen, a White House reporter with BNA, a trade publication for government professionals, had been on pool duty earlier in the day, which included live reports on Mr. Obama’s half a round of golf, until the White House press office had given the lid—journalism-speak for the notice that the president would have no more avails for the rest of the day. When the lid was suddenly lifted, she hustled back to the White House from her home in suburban Maryland, but administration officials remained tight-lipped. She was emailing and calling around to her sources when Mr. Urbahn’s tweet went live.

“Apparently a few minutes later it hit Twitter, and a colleague of mine, a reporter friend of mine emailed me, and said I believe bin Laden has died,” Ms. Bolen said.

Sam Stein, the Huffington Post’s man in D.C., was packing up to attend his grandmother’s funeral in Connecticut when he went back to work and started scrolling through Twitter, listening to cable news and emailing his editors. A reporter on staff who knew Mr. Urbahn reached out to him, and the rest of the staff now at least had a more specific, yes-or-no question to ask to their sources.

Ari Fleischer, the former press secretary to President George W. Bush, got a Washington Post news alert on his BlackBerry.

“I immediately went into Defcon One,” he said, fearing that news of a biological attack was about to be announced. He sat down in front of his television with his Twitter.

“I saw Keith’s tweet, and it made perfect sense to me,” he said. “And I started tweeting, retweeting him, sending my own messages out. Nights like last night, Americans go to Twitter. And that’s where the news broke.”

Part of the reason for this was, of course, Mr. Urbahn’s bio, listed right on the top of his Twitter page: “Chief of Staff, Office of Donald Rumsfeld, Navy Reserve intel officer, and owner of two miniature dachshunds.”

It was naturally assumed that Mr. Urbahn’s “reputable source” was none other than his boss, Mr. Rumsfeld.

“It was a pretty definitive statement, and I think it just clicked in people’s minds that, given who Keith works for, he wasn’t just making shit up,” said Noah Pollak, a fellow young conservative thinker in Washington and friend of Mr. Urbahn’s. “And that’s also not Keith. He wasn’t prone to exaggeration. He is a pretty straight-shooting guy.” 

Mr. Urbahn disputed the notion that his proximity to Mr. Rumsfeld may have led the rest of the universe to assume that he had gotten the information from someone who maintains close ties with the Defense Department.

“If you look at my Twitter feed, it’s very detached from my job,” he said. “I think they are separate. It’s more personal. I don’t see them as linked.”

Mr. Urbahn said he wrote it, in fact, without regard to how it would be perceived.

“It didn’t give me pause at the time simply because I thought it would be repeated many more times and there was no chance in God’s green earth that my tweet would in fact be what broke the news,” he said.

Still, when Mr. Fleischer, for one, saw the post, he said that he just assumed that it was sent out with the former defense secretary’s sanction, not least because of the Rumsfeldian sign-off “hot damn.”

“I can only presume that Donald Rumsfeld and Rumsfeld’s office made the judgment before they hit tweet that they were not going to have egg on their face. Whether you are saying something live on the air during an interview or you are tweeting, if you are wrong about something famously prominent in an area where it is your expertise, people will take notice.

“He had to know he had it right before he hit the tweet,” Fleischer continued. “He had to know. Keith and the secretary. Frankly, I don’t think people who work for Donald Rumsfeld would mess with something that important without the boss’ approval. I don’t know that, because I haven’t talked to Keith, but knowing Rummy.”

Added Mr. Fleischer, “I am always conscious of my former job when I tweet.”

Told by The Observer, however, that Mr. Urbahn did not in fact clear the 140-character message with Mr. Rumsfeld, or, by his own account, give much thought as to what it would mean, Mr. Fleischer sat in silence for several seconds.

“Wow. I am startled. He didn’t clear it with Rummy? Wow. Wow. Well, that puts it in a different light. … I think you are onto a really interesting story because that was how the world learned.”

Mr. Urbahn said that had Mr. Rumsfeld provided the information, he would not have sent it out into the world.

“It would not be his style to do that, and if he would have told me, I would have kept it in confidence, for sure,” he said.

Mr. Urbahn acknowledged that it was, in fact, his relationship with Mr. Rumsfeld that sent high-ranking news executives calling him late on a Sunday evening, and he said that his boss seemed unconcerned, despite next-day stories about it in The Times, Politico and the Daily Caller.

“We’ve laughed it off,” he said. “We haven’t had long conversations about it, and I think it is what it is.”

Mr. Urbahn added: “He is 78 years old, but he understands social media. He is on Twitter himself and he tweets things and comes up with ideas for things to throw on Facebook, and you know he gets it. I didn’t have to explain to him what it was. He knew.”

(As for Mr. Urbahn’s other job, as an intelligence officer in the Navy Reserve, a spokeswoman declined to say if the tweet was inappropriate, directing The Observer instead to a part of the Navy’s guidelines for social media usage “best practices.”)

Mr. Urbahn seemed anxious for his newfound celebrity to pass. He is not, he said, interested in a second career as a breaking news Tweeter. He said that the real story is about the journalists who stayed up late working their sources, and, of course, about the Navy SEALS who performed the operation, and the intelligence agents who tracked bin Laden, and the president who authorized the strike. He doesn’t know what it means now that journalists have to compete against their sources to break stories.

“I mean, I can’t really wrap my head around all of this so I may not be the best person to analyze why this has become the story,” he said. “This is a bit of a distraction, and it reaches a little bit to the level of media navel-gazing for my taste.”

And although there has been some snickering that an aide to an Obama antagonist stepped on the president’s message before he could address the nation, Mr. Urbahn is quick to point out that he only beat the Twitter feeds of the White House’s top correspondents by a few minutes. Reporters and flacks—and, well, everyone—he said, would have to get used a to a new social media world without the same rules and standards.

Still, the question remains: Hot damn?

He laughed.

“It’s got a Southern ring to it,” Mr. Urbahn said. “Maybe something I picked up from my wife’s family being from Kentucky, but it’s not a known phrase of mine. At least I don’t think so.”

dfreedlander@observer.com, nfreeman@observer.com

"It's a moment of triumph and I think it's very important for New Yorkers," she said in an interview on CBS' Early Show this morning. She said she had spoken to some firefighters and other responders, including John Feal, with whom she worked closely on the 9/11 health care bill, and said: "They just feel like it's one for the good guys."

Gillibrand was asked about U.S. relations with Pakistan, which she visited in November. "We've had a very push-me-pull-me relationship with Pakistan for a long time," she said. "We have invested billions of dollars in that country, but when we've asked them to run certain operations, we don't always get the answer that we want."

"It creates a sense of urgency on behalf of the Afghan people to take security into their own hands. I think it's a political target date, I don't think it's a military target date," she said. She added that it would have similar effects in Pakistan.

"It also puts pressure on the Pakistan government to really root out these safe havens and understand that we're not there forever. If they care about their security that they have every interest in the world to make sure these operations are successful now."

She noted that having a withdrawal date strategy was also effective in Iraq.  And although she conceded that the Iraq War was in many ways different from Afghanistan, she said that the timetable caused local leaders in northern Iraq to become responsible for security on their own, thereby forcing out terrorists. "I support it because it's a good tactic," she said.

The date will also give Obama another chance to assess his partnership with Karzai's government and Pakistani leadership, she said. She stressed the importance of their cooperation in building functional, secure, drug trade- and corruption-free economies for the region.

Gillibrand was joined by Senators John McCain, Lindsey Graham, and Joe Lieberman on the tour, which included meetings with Afghanistan President Karzai and Pakistan Prime Minister Gilani, in addition to General Petraeus and Ambassador Eikenberry.  McCain and Graham have both since advocated for a later withdrawal date.

Gillibrand said one of the trip's goals was to help President Karzai find ways to root out corruption. "Creating a fundamental rule of lawis one of the most important priorities we have," she said. Currently, people are too afraid to prosecute corrupt government and security officials because prosecutors and judges are often the targets of violence, according to Gillibrand.

According to Gillibrand, Prime Minister Gilani told the senators he is committed to preventing a new generation of terrorists from being bred across the porous Afghanistan-Pakistan border.

Gillibrand had a hopeful report of the Helmand province of Afghanistan, which has been peaceful for over a year. There she saw farmers distributing winter wheat to plant and visited a new school servicing 30-40 local boys.

"These areas are the birthplace of the Taliban and they have actually built markets and a school and have brought legitimate farming to the local economy," she said. "You could really see what the future of Afghanistan could be."

In a phone interview yesterday, Gillibrand also showed herself to be seriously engaged in foreign affairs issues relating to Pakistan, where she said the jury was still out on whether American drones targeting Al Qaeda and Taliban fighters within Pakistan's borders were productive.

She did suggest that the Pakistani government essentially ceding control of Pakistan's Swat region to the Taliban in exchange for a truce was an untenable situation.

"Long term, they will reach a different resolution," said Ms. Gillibrand. "I think this may be a short-term status. But I think long term it will be different, because long term we are going to have to combat terrorism everywhere and we are going to have to work with the Pakistani government effectively."

It would be, Mr. Obama said, “a new beginning—a new dawn of American leadership to overcome the challenges of the 21st century.”

Except, perhaps, in the one place where order is needed most.

The terrorist attacks in Mumbai that killed more than 170 people have rendered instantly quaint the president-elect’s blueprint to use aggressive diplomacy to engineer a stable relationship between nuclear-armed neighbors India and Pakistan, and to formulate a regional approach to winning the war in Afghanistan.

Furthermore, Pakistan and India experts say, Mr. Obama’s plan to invest billions of dollars in non-military resources in Pakistan is endangered by the economic crisis at home, and by Pakistan’s less-than-sympathetic status following the attacks.

After running as the antidote to Mr. Bush’s foreign policy, it’s not even clear anymore whether Mr. Obama and Mrs. Clinton will be able to do anything significantly different from the Bush administration in the world’s most intense hot spot.

“They are going to have to run to catch up with events,” said Stephen Cohen, the author of The Idea of Pakistan and a prominent scholar at the Brookings Institution on issues relating to the subcontinent.

Mr. Cohen said that the attack in Mumbai “makes it harder to pursue the kind of policy that he had conceived of, which is support the Pakistanis, work on the Indians to help us support the Pakistanis so we can be better off in Afghanistan. I think from a Pakistani and Indian point of view, forget about it. 

“The Indians,” he said, “are not going to want to normalize with Pakistan now, not for a long time.”

Somewhat ironically, given the largely rapturous international reaction to the election of the cosmopolitan and internationalist Mr. Obama, his diplomatic options for dealing with both Pakistan and India may be especially limited.

Officially, there is no shortage of goodwill. In a Dec. 2 appearance on Larry King Live, Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari said: “I think there’s a world romance with Obama. And we all in Pakistan—throughout the world there’s a romance to Obama, and we are looking forward to working with him.” He also called Mrs. Clinton “an excellent choice” for secretary of state.

But there is also the lingering specter of Mr. Obama’s remarks during the campaign—which drew a sharp rebuke at the time from Mrs. Clinton—that he would pursue “high-value terrorist targets” inside Pakistan if the Pakistanis failed to do so. Since then, militarily effective American incursions into Pakistan—denounced regularly by the Pakistani government—have grown enormously unpopular there, and have provided India with a potential rationale for launching a unilateral response to the Mumbai attacks.

“I didn’t think it was a good move at the time,” said Daniel Markey, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. “I think he is paying a price for it just off the bat in terms of his diplomatic relationship with the Pakistanis. It would have been much more positive if he didn’t say it.”

Mr. Obama’s political outreach to India won’t be much simpler.

The Bush administration saw the nation as a counterweight to China in the region and pushed through a controversial deal, independent of recognized nonproliferation treaties, that permitted civilian nuclear trade between the U.S. and India. (Mr. Obama initially opposed the deal on the grounds that it gave India a “blank check” that could encourage an arms race in the region. He eventually supported the bill, which passed in October, when some of his restrictions, including measures meant to deter stockpiling, were implemented.)

But the president-elect’s restrained posture on India was perceived by the country’s political leadership as a snub, according to India experts.

“Over the life of the Bush administration, they saw a major breakthrough with India on this nuclear deal and major shifts in the nature of government-to-government interactions with India,” said Mr. Markey. “Most people that I’ve talked to on the Obama side are more inclined to see the next period with India as one of consolidating those gains and maybe pushing ahead on some things that are more economic. But it is not by any stretch the priority, really, that Pakistan is.”

This, theoretically, is where Mrs. Clinton could help.

“She’s a known quantity,” said Nicholas Platt, a former ambassador to Pakistan under George H. W. Bush and the president emeritus of the Asia Society in New York. “She’s known in the area. She’s got stature.”

Mr. Platt said that the Clinton name was especially popular in the region because Bill Clinton, when he was president, had taken steps to improve relations with India and worked to defuse tensions between the two nuclear powers.  

Together with Mrs. Clinton at the press conference on Dec. 1, Mr. Obama dismissed their old disagreements as campaign hyperbole and argued for a foreign policy that “skillfully uses, balances and integrates all elements of American power.”

After the attacks in Mumbai, which are suspected to be the work of the Pakistan-based militant group Lashkar-e-Taiba, advisers to Mr. Obama said he intended to seize on the tragedy as an opportunity to apply pressure on Pakistan to work with India and the United States and to abandon the extremist elements they have created, nurtured and deployed in the past to further their foreign policy goals.  

With Pakistan’s cooperation, India could respond with concessions to help resolve the Kashmir question. Pakistan could turn its military attention to Afghanistan, and the United States could begin injecting cash for health care, education and nation-building projects that would eventually serve to make Pakistan less dangerous and radical and nuclear.

But that is clearly a very best-case scenario.

“We should not be delusional that doing chummy things that are welcomed in that part of the world will get them to make the concessions or the hard decisions that we would like,” said Les Gelb, the former president of the Council on Foreign Relations. He added that Pakistanis consider India a much greater threat than the Taliban, and “we’re not going to make that go away by providing more Pakistanis with refrigerators.”

Among the other problems for Mr. Obama and Mrs. Clinton will be that they don’t have an obvious interlocutor in Pakistan. The new democratically elected government has made helpful statements (“We must all stand together to fight out this menace,” Mr. Zardari told the Financial Times), but exercises little control over the Pakistani military or intelligence.

Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency, for example, has trained and supported Taliban fighters in Afghanistan. Militant groups widely believed to have links to the agency have perpetrated attacks against the Indian Parliament and the Indian embassy in Afghanistan.

The view among many Pakistan experts is that the Pakistani military prefers an unstable Afghanistan because that keeps it less susceptible to Indian influence.

Some experts warn that unrealistic demands on Mr. Zardari will only weaken him and pave the way for yet another military coup or, nightmarishly, hasten the failure of a nuclear-armed state.

Meanwhile, across the eastern border, Manmohan Singh, India’s prime minister, is under pressure to make a show of anger toward Pakistan, especially given upcoming elections in the spring in which an emboldened Hindu nationalist opposition is strongly favored.

During the Dec. 1 press conference, Mr. Obama said he had told Mr. Singh that “Americans stand with the people of India in this dark time. And I am confident that India’s great democracy is more resilient than killers who would tear it down.”

“I think the Obama approach was always putting the Indians off because it put them at the end of a chain,” said Mr. Cohen. “And the chain began with Afghanistan and then Pakistan and then only India, despite all the rhetoric about India being a great country, blah, blah, blah. They clearly did not see India as a major strategic player in Asia.”

That sort of skepticism, in turn, will make it that much more difficult for the Obama administration to round up support for a regional approach to solving Afghanistan by way of Kashmir.

“Obviously, the Obama regional framework in the next few weeks or months is on ice,” said Vanda Felbab-Brown, also of the Brookings Institution.

According to most of the experts interviewed for this article, Mr. Obama is receiving advice on the issue of Pakistan from Bruce Riedel, a former C.I.A. operative and a senior fellow at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution.

Mr. Riedel did not return requests for an interview, but in remarks to the Council on Foreign Relations earlier this year, he said that he knew from experience, from when the United States backed the armed resistance to the Soviet Union in the 1980s, that it was impossible for insurgents to lose in Afghanistan as long as Pakistan provided a safe haven. Still, he said, “any American leader that was told that we had very good intelligence, at a certain point and a certain time, will act on that intelligence. And they should. But, you have to be sure it’s really, really good intelligence. And not a setup that someone is deliberately trying to put you in.”

He added, however, that “Predator strikes are not a long-term solution.”

(Another expert on the region reported to be advising Mr. Obama, Jonah Blank, a senior adviser to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, also declined to comment during the course of the transition.)

Asked during the press conference in Chicago if India also had the right to pursue high-value targets inside Pakistan, Mr. Obama responded, “I think that sovereign nations obviously have a right to protect themselves. Beyond that, I don’t want to comment on the specific situation that’s taking place in South Asia right now.”

“Indian incursions have a fundamentally different quality to them than anything that we do,” said Mr. Markey. “Despite the fact that the Pakistanis really, really don’t like that we’re doing this, it’s not just a game.”

He added, “To kind of even signal a yellow light to Indian reprisals is a bad step. I don’t think that’s what Obama is doing. But I think that hawks in India will be looking for opportunities.”

In other words, after all the heady expectations built up for the prospective foreign policy super-team of Mr. Obama and Mrs. Clinton, they’re going to have to be extremely careful, first and foremost, to do no harm.

“Ninety-nine percent of the issues that face people who face international affairs are coping issues, not solving issues,” said Mr. Platt. “One percent you can solve every once in a while.”

jhorowitz@observer.com

Writes Mr. Barnes:

In a conspiracy like this, you build from the outer edges and you go step by step...

Is The Times out to get Angelina Jolie—the woman whom Esquire's Tom Junod has called "the best woman in the world, in terms of her generosity, her dedication, and her courage"?

Well, take a look at the cover of this week's New York Times Magazine.

Really uncool.

Bhutto’s death marks the most sobering setback for the U.S. policy elite because it points up the absence of any coherent policy in the critical majority-Muslim nation, now the third-leading recipient of U.S. military aid, behind Israel and Egypt.

Ever since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, the Bush White House has let American policy chime in unison with the interests of Pakistan’s strongman leader Pervez Musharraf—whom candidate George W. Bush famously failed to name in a 2000 campaign pop quiz on world affairs shortly after Musharraf came to power in a bloodless coup. Indeed, the upcoming January Pakistan election—which may be delayed several weeks as Bhutto’s son and widower succeed her as joint leaders of the Pakistan Peoples Party—marked the first significant U.S. deviation from its no-strings-attached commitment to shoring up General Musharraf’s increasingly authoritarian regime. State Department representatives let General Musharraf know that he would be expected to minimize tampering with this month’s Pakistani presidential ballot—which even in the best of times falls significantly short of “free and fair” status—while also relinquishing his leadership position in the always influential Pakistani military.

These were modest policy departures. But even so, observers of the region note, it was a tough sell to White House hardliners.

“The decision to try to be the broker of a deal between Benazir and Pervez was a divisive question in the White House,” says Bruce Riedel, a 30-year C.I.A. veteran who served as a South Asian national security adviser to the administrations of George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush and now is a senior fellow at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution. “The National Security Council and the vice president’s office had to be convinced under a lot of pressure to come around to this, and I suspect that their hearts were never fully in it.”

One stark measure of this lassitude was the clear alarm sounded by a pair of suicide-bomb attacks on pro-Bhutto crowds greeting the opposition candidate as she headed to the Karachi airport after a major rally in support of her candidacy. After the attack—which claimed the lives of more than 140 Pakistanis—Texas Democratic Representative Shelia Jackson Lee, who co-chairs the House Pakistan caucus, wrote to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice imploring the United States to pursue more active security measures in concert with the United Nations to ensure the safety of Bhutto, General Musharraf and other Pakistani political leaders. Senators Joseph Biden, Patrick Leahy and Joseph Lieberman sent a similar letter directly to General Musharraf—a legislative overture that wouldn’t be necessary if a more robust White House commitment to the security of Bhutto and other candidates were in place.

“Over the last two or three months, we’ve been crying ourselves hoarse to the United States and Musharraf to provide Madame Bhutto with more security,” says a U.S. representative of the P.P.P. who requested anonymity due to Pakistan’s volatile political state. “There were intimidation and harassment happening every night. In the middle of the night, I’d get an e-mail from one of her rallies saying there was full security on hand—and then, a few hours later, I’d hear that all the security was gone. These harassment tactics had been going on for months—and for God’s sake, this is a former prime minister we’re talking about.”

One can only hope that General Musharraf and his U.S. backers will step up security measures as Bhutto’s husband, Asif Ali Zardari, and son, Bilawal Zardari, succeed to the P.P.P. leadership for the coming elections.

“The chance that this wasn’t going to happen at some point was small,” said Patrick Lang, former head of Middle East and South Asian intelligence for the Defense Intelligence Agency. “Pakistan is a killing place. It was created out of an unstable mixture of people united by their varying ferocity over Islam.

“A great danger for Musharraf now comes from the fact that we insist that he be something—and that Pakistan be something—that they both are not,” Mr. Lang said. “I heard that idiot [Chris] Matthews say on his show the other night that the majority of Pakistanis are both moderate and secular. If we’re going to squeeze Musharraf hard to be something he isn’t, and can’t be, his position becomes ever more fragile. And an army coup or a successful assassination of Musharraf becomes, I think, a real possibility.”

While not all observers share Mr. Lang’s fatalism, there’s a growing sense that the country’s long-standing history of corruption and political violence may be veering past the point of no return.

“There never used to be any suicide bombings in Pakistan,” said the P.P.P. representative. “Yes, there’s been political violence, but it’s never been at this level, ever.”

Nor is the Pakistani Army—the source of General Musharraf’s now-waning legitimacy—immune from the spread of Islamist terrorism. Pakistan’s elite Inter-Services Intelligence have long collaborated with Taliban and Al Qaeda forces—the Taliban, indeed, owes its institutional origins to the I.S.I.’s early care and feeding. And now regular troops are starting to bow to the influence of extremists.

“What we’re seeing in the Pakistani army is unprecedented levels of desertion,” said Mr. Riedel. “You’ve got whole groups of Pakistani troops surrendering en masse when they come into contact with Taliban and Islamist forces.

“Pakistan is becoming a failed state,” Mr. Riedel said, “though it’s not yet there. A lot of the blame for that lies with the Pakistanis, but George W. Bush can’t escape some of that responsibility. We’ve been standing by this dictator for so long who has undermined civil society and supported extremists that we’ve left ourselves with few other choices.” As a result, he says, “the two most unpopular people in Pakistan today are General Musharraf and President Bush.”

That doesn’t exactly bode well for Bush’s successor, especially given the now lavish scale of American aid to the Musharraf regime—much of it scarcely tied to the fight against Islamic extremism. The United States “has been giving money for developing targets for the Pakistani Air Force and the Navy,” the P.P.P. representative says. “Well, the last time I looked, Al Qaeda had no air force or navy.”

Such lax oversight is all too characteristic, the representative says, of a White House seeking largely to wish away its own policy dilemmas and contradictions. “On the one hand, the U.S. says, ‘We don’t want to meddle ourselves in another country’s internal politics.’ But at the same time, they’ve sent this regime $10 billion over the past eight years. If you’ve bought the leverage, then why aren’t you using it?”

Here's Markey:

"Some of the candidates have in the past -- the most significant one was when Barack Obama made his comments about his willingness to go into Pakistan if necessary if the Pakistanis wouldn't act to clean out Al Qaeda. And that made waves back in Pakistan and certainly complicated diplomacy with the government of Pakistan. It made Musharraf's life more difficult because it appeared that the United States and somebody speaking as a potential president of the United States... The way it was played back in Pakistan was that they were threatening to invade. And I think my concern would be with the current political campaign cycle in full swing is that you could get some of the candidates saying things again that looked threatening or menacing."

From the candidates' statements reacting to this morning's news of Bhutto's assassination, the one offered by Bill Richardson seems most likely to meet Markey's definition of unhelpful meddling.

From Richardson's statement:

UPDATE: The Obama campaign sends over the following exchange between Bhutto and a questioner at C.F.R. event in August.

QUESTIONER: You may have covered that, what I was going to ask you next, but let me try it anyhow.

We had quite an interesting, and indeed still are, mini-debate here politically between two — initially two of the Democratic aspirants for presidents, and it spread now across party lines. And Barack Obama kicked it off by saying, "If we have actionable intelligence about high-value terrorist targets and President Musharraf won't act, we will." That's a direct quote from a recent speech of his. What is your reaction to that?

BHUTTO: Well, I wouldn't like the United States to violate Pakistan's sovereignty with unauthorized military operations. But the issue that I would like to stress is that Barack Obama also said, if Pakistan won't act. And that's the critical issue, that the government has to act. And the government has to act to protect Pakistan's own serenity and integrity, its own respect, and to understand that if it creates a vacuum, then others aren't going to just twiddle their thumbs while militants freely move across the border.

I think General Musharraf did the right thing recently in admitting that militants are using our soil, but he said the army has nothing to do with it. But nonetheless, the issue for me is that we cannot cede parts of Pakistani territory to anybody; not just the Taliban, to anybody. That in Pakistan we have one army, one police, one constitution, one government. We cannot allow parallel armies, parallel militias, parallel laws and parallel command structures. Today it's not just the intelligence services, who were previously called a state within a state. Today it's the militants who are becoming yet another little state within the state, and this is leading some people to say that Pakistan is on the slippery slope of being called a failed state. But this is a crisis for Pakistan, that unless we deal with the extremists and the terrorists, our entire state could founder.

Terrorism is loathsome everywhere it strikes, but today's bombing really sticks in the craw. Someone evil in that region just silenced a voice that could have done a lot of good for that country."