INTO THE HOT ZONE

No one, it seems, is completely safe in Pakistan. On March 11, police quietly captured six men in the Islamist stronghold of Peshawar who had talked by telephone to Ramzi Yousef just before the accused mastermind of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing was himself arrested in Pakistan and quickly extradited to the U.S. The six were suspected of conspiring with Yousef in his skein of terrorist plots, but only after they had been questioned last week did Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto learn that she too had been a target of the terrorists.

According to an interview Bhutto gave to Reuter last Saturday, Yousef was busy scheming to assassinate her in the fall of 1993, seven months after the U.S. attack and shortly before she was elected Prime Minister. Armed with explosives, she recounted, he headed for her high-walled oceanside estate in Karachi intent on murder. But one of the devices detonated prematurely, injuring Yousef. Authorities did not catch up with him again until they nabbed him on Feb. 7 in Islamabad.

Bhutto's revelation, which could not be independently confirmed, heightened the popular perception that Pakistan is a growing haven for terrorists and criminals. The arrests of more alleged conspirators confirmed that the terrorist trail continues to span the breadth of the country, from the fundamentalist cells of Peshawar to the violence-riddled commercial capital of Karachi, where the U.S. State Department last week ordered the evacuation of all school-age children of American officials. U.S. agents are still hunting for Mir Aimal Kansi, wanted for the murders of two CIA officers in Langley, Virginia, two years ago. He is believed to be hiding in Baluchistan, another center of lawlessness.

Nevertheless, First Lady Hillary Clinton is scheduled to arrive in Islamabad on Saturday determined to turn toward gentler issues. Her two-day sojourn, part of a 10-day sweep through Southwest Asia, is intended, said President Clinton, to show that "there is truly a human dimension to politics, policy and diplomacy." Her agenda will take her and daughter Chelsea to schools, mosques and villages where she can cast a spotlight on issues of women, education and health care. The real diplomacy of repairing tattered U.S.-Pakistan relations will be left to Bhutto, who will come to the U.S. for two weeks in April.

But even a determined Hillary Clinton will find it hard to turn attention away from Pakistan's perils. She arrives little more than two weeks after three U.S. consulate workers were ambushed in Karachi and two of them slain. Some Pakistani officials theorize that the killings could have been meant as a warning against her trip. Pakistani authorities no doubt hope the latest arrests will help calm the atmosphere, even though there is no connection so far between Yousef's associates and the murders. To improve security, in the past week hundreds of militants have been detained.