Is the President Safe in Pakistan?
March 3, 2006 — -- When the president went to Baghdad on Thanksgiving in 2003, it was a top-secret operation not made public until he had left Iraq.
Today, he flew into Pakistan on a trip that has been public for two weeks now, a trip that will present perhaps the greatest physical risk to him since he took office.
"I'm sure when President Bush arrives there, there will be very special extra security measures because if any place is going to have an attack on the president, it is going to be Pakistan," Richard Clarke, a former counterterrorism official and now an ABC News consultant, said before the trip.
Pakistan's major cities are places where al Qaeda and other militant Islamist groups thrive. In fact, in the last year, new al Qaeda training camps have actually opened inside Pakistan.
In those camps, Osama bin Laden is hailed as a hero, and the Pakistani and American presidents are seen as infidels.
Pakistan is "a country with thousands, if not tens of thousands, of militants who have been subcontracted by al Qaeda, and some of whom rub shoulders with senior members of the military," said Alexis Debat, an ABC News consultant and a senior fellow at George Washington University's Homeland Security Policy Institute.
Bush was scheduled to spend 24 hours in the capital, Islamabad, where there have been, in the last few years, at least three known attempts on the life of Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf.
Debat pointed out that one of the attempts involved placing explosives in a tunnel under the runway where Bush is slated to land.
When President Clinton went to Pakistan in March 2000, the Secret Service used elaborate deceits to throw potential assassins off the trail.
Jennifer Palmieri, Clinton's former deputy press secretary, said she and her colleagues at the time knew it was "a very risky proposition [and] the Secret Service was not happy."
"They don't ever quite recommend against trips, they do, this was the most serious concern I think that they ever expressed about a trip that we did end up taking," she said.
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