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ABC chose the eastern side of the Khyber Pass as Nick Schifrin filed from Islamabad on the looming offensive by the Pakistani military in the Swat Valley. Refugees have already left, forming "makeshift tent camps" in the nation's capital, "no electricity, no running water and little food." Schifrin called the valley itself "a ghost town" as the army prepares to attack. "It is the third operation in the Swat in the last two years. After the previous battles failed the Pakistani government signed a peace deal with the Taliban hoping they would lay down their arms. They did not."
Back in Washington, ABC's Martha Raddatz (at the tail of the Schifrin videostream) reported that the United States had pressured the Pakistani military to make "a sustained shift in emphasis away from India to the Afghan border area" and to increase training in counterinsurgency. Her unidentified sources in the Obama Administration "are very, very skeptical that this will happen." From the White House, NBC's Chuck Todd cited "two questions hanging over the summit that US officials were ducking all over the place." Will the United States send troops into Pakistan? Is Pakistan's nuclear arsenal secure? "The whole point of this summit," Todd observed, is to get President Asif Ali Zardari of Pakistan "focused on his fight so that we do not have to deal with those two questions."
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