Obama Expresses Sympathy for Musharraf

Democratic presidential hopeful, Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., talks to the media during a news conference in Oakland, Calif., on Wednesday, Aug. 8, 2007. (AP Photo/Tony Avelar) (Tony Avelar - AP)

The closest Obama came to directly criticizing the Bush administration on the matter was to cite a report in The New York Times that said then-Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld had called off a raid against al-Qaida leaders in Pakistan in 2005, despite having actionable intelligence.

Gibbs went a step further than the candidate in a subsequent telephone interview, saying that the aborted raid showed "the White House actually doesn't have a policy" on Pakistan.

"The American public needs to understand these issues because part of what's at stake in this next, upcoming foreign policy debate is the need to shift resources out of Iraq, in part to attend to these problems," Obama said. "If the American people don't understand that this is where the real threat is, that we're on the wrong battlefield right now, then we may get confused and elect a president who continues down the wrong road instead of the one that's really going to make a difference in terms of our security."

In Islamabad, Azim said Musharraf's government is not ruling out imposing a state of emergency because of "external and internal threats" to Pakistan and deteriorating law and order in the volatile northwest near the Afghan border. He referred to recent military action against militants in northwestern border areas that he said had resulted in the deaths of many soldiers.

Obama spoke to reporters after spending the morning with a home health care worker, Pauline Beck, as she made her rounds in Oakland. The senator helped clean a house, and said afterward it had reshaped his views on health care and unions.

He also said it was more gratifying work, in some ways, than working the halls of Congress.

"It actually was kind of liberating. When you're in the Senate you spend all your time talking," he said. "When you're cleaning out some cobwebs or you're mopping the floor, and you wring out the mop and you see the dirty mop water, you know that you actually accomplished something."

Obama was the fourth Democratic presidential candidate to participate in a program sponsored by SEIU, the service-workers' union.

___

Associated Press writer Sadaqat Jan in Islamabad, Pakistan, contributed to this report.