A passage to Pakistan, and India

Posted by Mark Silva at 7:45 am CST

ANDREWS AIR FORCE BASE – President Bush is bound for India and Pakistan today, with Air Force One fuelling up for a 17-hour passage to New Delhi and the president spending the night on board.

And I'm going with him.

The first cardinal sin of parachute reporting is interviewing a cab driver, but how can you resist when the driver to Andrews is a Pakistani.

"It's like the 70's over there,'' my driver, Nassir Khan, advises me of his hometown Islamabad.

He's not talking about the times. He's talking about the temperature – proof that in these times of political turmoil, with elusive terrorists hiding in the mountains and caves of Pakistan's Pashtun region and Bush on his way to visit the military dictator who has pledged to hunt them down, weather trumps all.

"If you're in sunshine,'' Khan says, "you're probably going to sweat a lot. But overnight, it's cool. You probably don't even need a fan.''

Khan left Pakistan 10 years ago, leaving a brother and two sisters behind. But he is here with his wife.

"I'm one of the lucky guys,'' he says.

I wasn't his first passenger bound for Pakistan or India this week. He also delivered to the airport an executive for Verizon, the telecommunications company, on his way to visit a few hundred workers in India helping his company with the development of computer software – another spoke in the global wheel.

The president, only the fourth American leader to visit India since its independence from Great Britain in 1947, will be touting the economic ties of the United States and the world's largest democracy – with more than a billion people already, expected to become the world's most populous nation in a few decades.

He also will attempt to take home an agreement for support of India's nuclear power industry – breaking decades of U.S. policy toward a nation that was allied with the Soviet Union in the Cold War. That agreement is proving as elusive as the terrorists that the U.S. and Pakistan is hunting in the hills of Pashtun – with India insisting on keeping about one third of its nuclear reactors within a military weaponry program that is exempt from United Nations oversight. The U.S. wants India to put all of its power-generating reactors in a separate civilian program subject to the rules and inspection of the International Atomic Energy Agency.

Nick Burns, the undersecretary of state for political affairs, traveled to India last week in an eleventh-hour attempt to hammer out an agreement for Bush and Indian Prime Minister Mammohan Singh to sign during their meetings in New Delhi this week. But Burns quickly came home last week – generally not a good sign of progress in international relations – with the White House promising to press ahead with long-distance negotiations. Presumably, Verizon could be of some service in this regard.

Nassir Khan has dropped me off at Andrews.

I'm ready for a long day's journey out of sight.