MARGARET WARNER: For more on the latest developments in Pakistan, we go to Griff Witte, Washington Post Pakistan bureau chief, and Steve Coll, New Yorker magazine journalist and author. He`s also president of the New America Foundation. ...

Now, Steve, I know you were both at this press conference today. And she pointed the finger pretty directly at some specific groups, did she not, Steve?

STEVE COLL: She named four overlapping networks, but didn`t really name groups, per se. But she was pointing to networks of Islamist militants, some operating on Pakistani soil for many years, others, foreigners who have come in as refugees from Afghanistan after 9/11. And she also implicated rogue elements of the Pakistani security services, services that have collaborated with some of these groups over the course of two decades.

MARGARET WARNER: So, Steve, go back to the point you were raising about people in the government. She also gave an interview that appeared today in Paris Match. What is her basic accusation about who it is still in government who might have been behind this?

STEVE COLL: Well, there are two levels to it. First, she seems to have come into possession of some specific information passed to her by a friendly government that she has not named about several former security officials who were actively plotting to kill her or harm her upon her return. And she says, quite remarkably, that she wrote a letter to President Musharraf about two days or three days before her return in which she named these officials and provided details about them.

At the press conference today, she was asked to identify them, and she said she wouldn`t do so as long as she was alive. In effect, she had written this letter as a kind of last will and testament about her suspicions.More broadly, she is observing something that many students of Pakistan could easily observe, which is that the country`s history during the last 20 years is marked by violent conspiracies that have occasionally involved rogue or directed elements of the police, sometimes the intelligence services, and less often the army, in violent conspiracies involving Pakistani politics.And she has been involved on the receiving end of those conspiracies in the past, and so she`s quick to suspect that they`re present in this case, this week.

MARGARET WARNER: And so, Steve, going to the election now, the upcoming parliamentary election still scheduled for January, is there any talk that this may change the election schedule in any way?

STEVE COLL: Well, there`s a lot of speculation about what the impact will be on the election and whether this will affect the schedule, whether it will affect the campaigning, whether it will affect the thinking on the supreme court as it makes a series of important decisions about the legitimacy of President Musharraf`s recent re-election. So the entire campaign has been thrown into some question.

But Benazir Bhutto today seemed to be on a mission to make clear that she intended to go ahead as planned, that she intended to seek the prime ministership and to campaign vigorously for the values that she trumpeted upon her return.

And I think the one observation that many people in Karachi were making today listening to her is that the era of PPP campaign, which is such a vivid part of Pakistani history, these mass rallies held in this province and in the heartland of the Punjab, may not be as viable in this security environment as they were when she left for exile about nine years ago.

So that`s a challenge that her party faces. That was their strength in campaigning before, and how they can carry it on in this security environment is a question they now face. ...

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