Pakistani planes bombed the Taliban in their Swat Valley bastion today, after the prime minister ordered elimination of “militants and terrorists” and on the heels of a commitment to Washington to fight extremists.

The struggle in the scenic north-western valley 80 miles from Islamabad and a former centre for tourism has become a test of Pakistan’s resolve to fight a growing Taliban insurgency that has alarmed the United States.

Helicopter gunships, fighters and troops were all involved in Swat operations, and up to 17 militants were killed after as many as 55 were killed the previous day, military officials said.

“To a rough estimate there are between 4,000 to 5,000 militants … present in Swat,” Major-General Athar Abbas, military spokesman, said in an interview with Dawn TV.

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As Taliban forces edged to within 60 miles of Islamabad late last month, the Obama administration urgently asked for new intelligence assessments of whether Pakistan’s government would survive. In briefings last week, senior officials said, President Obama and his National Security Council were told that neither a Taliban takeover nor a military coup was imminent and that the Pakistani nuclear arsenal was safe.

Beyond the immediate future, however, the intelligence was far from reassuring. Security was deteriorating rapidly, particularly in the mountains along the Afghan border that harbor al-Qaeda and the Taliban, intelligence chiefs reported, and there were signs that those groups were working with indigenous extremists in Pakistan’s populous Punjabi heartland.

The Pakistani government was mired in political bickering. The army, still fixated on its historical adversary India, remained ill-equipped and unwilling to throw its full weight into the counterinsurgency fight.

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Pakistani forces battled Taliban fighters on Monday as the militants denounced the army and government as U.S. stooges and said a peace pact would end unless the government halted its offensive.

The February pact and spreading Taliban influence have raised alarm in the United States about the ability of nuclear-armed Pakistan — which has a vital role in efforts to stabilize Afghanistan — to stand up to the militants.

Last month, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton accused Islamabad of abdicating to the Taliban while President Barack Obama expressed grave concern the government was “very fragile” and unable to deliver basic services.

Obama will present his strategy for defeating al Qaeda to Pakistan and Afghanistan leaders on Wednesday amid growing U.S. concern it is losing the Afghan war.

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This is the culmination of a long, patient slow-motion insurgency by the Taliban-al-Qaeda alliance suddenly propelled into a fast-moving and aggressive push on many fronts and forms. The jury is still out on the level of commitment of the Pakistani military push to take back Buner and, presumably, the Swat district from Taliban-al-Qaeda control.

The manner in which the Pakistanis pursue that push is critical. Will they continue to rely heavily on area weapons, such as artillery and helicopter gunships which cause much collateral damage and limited precision? Or will it shift to a boots-on-the-ground fight between men for Pakistan’s survival? And will those boots continue to be the less capable Frontier Corps paramilitary forces and local constabularies, or will the more professional and capable Pakistani Army assume the tip of the spear? These are important questions that we will learn the answers to over the coming days.

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The Obama administration reacted with increasing alarm yesterday to ongoing Taliban advances in Pakistan, warning the Pakistani government that failure to take action against the extremists could endanger its partnership with the United States as well as American strategy in neighboring Afghanistan.

“The news over the past several days is very disturbing,” White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said, adding that the administration “is extremely concerned” and that the issue was taking “a lot” of President Obama’s time.

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Swat used to offer some of the finest skiing in Asia. The season is now over, and is unlikely to return. The Taleban have taken over. They have shut hundreds of schools and, by some accounts, torn many of them down. They have banned the public playing of music and put up posters in barber’s shops warning men not to shave. On Wednesday, Taleban fighters pressed home their advantage by flooding the town of Buner, south of Swat, wrecking aid agencies’ offices and occupying those of the local government. Yesterday the Pakistani Frontier Constabulary responded by sending some 300 troops to the region, but they are outnumbered by up to 8,000 armed Islamist radicals. Buner is 65 miles from Islamabad.

As the Taleban took Buner, Hillary Clinton told a congressional committee in Washington that Pakistan faces “an existential threat”. She is right. Sharia is now the law across much of the country’s mountainous north west. Its enforcers control most of the region’s hearts and minds – and territory. In doing so they pass devastating judgment on the fecklessness of President Zardari and his bewildered young Government, which last week explicitly surrendered jurisdiction over Swat in a deal with its new overlords.

The last time that England was in a position comparable to Pakistan’s was in 1644…

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Taliban militants appeared to be consolidating their control Thursday after this week’s land-grab of a district about 96 kilometers (60 miles) from Pakistan’s capital, Islamabad.

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A potentially troubling era dawned Sunday in Pakistan’s Swat Valley, where a top Islamist militant leader, emboldened by a peace agreement with the federal government, laid out an ambitious plan to bring a “complete Islamic system” to the surrounding northwest region and the entire country.

Speaking to thousands of followers in an address aired live from Swat on national news channels, cleric Sufi Mohammed bluntly defied the constitution and federal judiciary, saying he would not allow any appeals to state courts under the system of sharia, or Islamic law, that will prevail there as a result of the peace accord signed by the president Tuesday.

“The Koran says that supporting an infidel system is a great sin,” Mohammed said, referring to Pakistan’s modern democratic institutions. He declared that in Swat, home to 1.5 million people, all “un-Islamic laws and customs will be abolished,” and he suggested that the official imprimatur on the agreement would pave the way for sharia to be installed in other areas.

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The Taliban have advanced deeper into Pakistan by engineering a class revolt that exploits profound fissures between a small group of wealthy landlords and their landless tenants, according to government officials and analysts here.

The strategy cleared a path to power for the Taliban in the Swat Valley, where the government allowed Islamic law to be imposed this week, and it carries broad dangers for the rest of Pakistan, particularly the militants’ main goal, the populous heartland of Punjab Province.

In Swat, accounts from those who have fled now make clear that the Taliban seized control by pushing out about four dozen landlords who held the most power.

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Taliban insurgents are teaming up with local militant groups to make inroads in Punjab, the province that is home to more than half of Pakistanis, reinvigorating an alliance that Pakistani and American authorities say poses a serious risk to the stability of the country.

The deadly assault in March in Lahore, Punjab’s capital, against the Sri Lankan cricket team, and the bombing last fall of the Marriott Hotel in Islamabad, the national capital, were only the most spectacular examples of the joint campaign, they said.

Now police officials, local residents and analysts warn that if the government does not take decisive action, these dusty, impoverished fringes of Punjab could be the next areas facing the insurgency. American intelligence and counterterrorism officials also said they viewed the developments with alarm.

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Gordon Brown is asking Pakistan for help after the arrest of 12 al-Qaeda terrorist suspects in Britain last night.

The results of Operation Pathway, the co-ordinated raids brought forward to yesterday after a security breach by Scotland Yard’s counter-terrorism chief, have raised considerable alarm because ten of those arrested were Pakistanis who have been staying in Britain on student visas. There are fears that they came to the country as genuine students before plotting to mount a terrorist attack, or even that they arrived under that guise with the intention of forming a terrorist sleeper cell.

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President Obama’s strategy of offering Pakistan a partnership to defeat the insurgency here calls for a virtual remaking of this nation’s institutions and even of the national psyche, an ambitious agenda that Pakistan’s politicians and people appear unprepared to take up.

Officially, Pakistan’s government welcomed Mr. Obama’s strategy, with its hefty infusions of American money, hailing it as a “positive change.” But as the Obama administration tries to bring Pakistanis to its side, large parts of the public, the political class and the military have brushed off the plan, rebuffing the idea that the threat from Al Qaeda and the Taliban, which Washington calls a common enemy, is so urgent.

Some, including the army chief, Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, and the president, Asif Ali Zardari, may be coming around. But for the military, at least, India remains priority No. 1, as it has for the 61 years of Pakistan’s existence.

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The key element in President Barack Obama’s Afghanistan strategy is getting Pakistan to fight the Taliban on its side of the border. But despite the Administration’s demanding a more concerted effort against militants on Pakistani soil as a condition for further aid to Pakistan’s military ”” and warnings by Centcom commander General David Petraeus and others that the Taliban threatens to destroy Pakistan as a state ”” many in Washington and beyond are skeptical that Pakistan will cooperate.

U.S. military officials have recently made clear that more than seven years after America went to war against the Taliban, Pakistan’s Inter Services Intelligence (ISI) agency continues to provide active support to Taliban forces fighting in Afghanistan. “Fundamentally, the strategic approach with the ISI must change,” Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Admiral Mike Mullen told CNN last Friday, “and [its] support … for militants [on both its Afghanistan and India borders] has to fundamentally shift.” But the problem is not confined to the ISI or elements within it. In a recent truce between the Pakistani army and local Taliban groups in the Pakistani region of Bajaur, militants recanted their hostility to Pakistani security forces but vowed to concentrate on fighting NATO forces in Afghanistan. And Pakistan has been far more tolerant of Taliban forces on its soil who conduct operations in Afghanistan than of those who fight the Pakistani government.

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At a Supreme Court hearing on Thursday in a property dispute, the defendant, Gul Zameen, insisted that Chief Justice Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry personally take his case rather than assign it to other justices, as his opponent requested.

“Please, I want you to hear the case,” said Mr. Zameen, 55, who has been fighting over a house in North-West Frontier Province since 1991.

Much to his relief, Mr. Chaudhry agreed.

“We hope he will do justice,” Mr. Zameen’s son, Shahid Rafiq, said later. “Not only with us but with everybody.”

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The region has been handed over to the Pakistani Taliban in a foolish bargain made on behalf of Mr. Zardari’s government. Like most violent revolutionary movements, the Taliban use social injustice and a half-understood philosophy as an excuse to grab land and power. Houses and property have been taken over, and the Taliban have announced that people should pay 40 percent of their rent to their landlords and 60 percent to “jihad.”

In the district capital, Mingora, decapitated corpses were dangled from lampposts with notices pinned to them stating the “un-Islamic” action that merited death. At least 185 schools, most for girls, have been closed. Government officials, journalists and security troops have had their throats slit. Little wonder that most of my brother-in-law’s family has fled, along with 400,000 others.

What many Westerners fail to understand is that the Swat Valley is not one of Pakistan’s wild border areas. It is only 100 miles from Islamabad. In the words of Shaheen Sardar Ali, a cousin of Sana’s who is a law professor at Warwick University in England and was the first female cabinet minister in the government of North-West Frontier Province, “Swat is not somewhere you could ever see as being a breeding ground for extremism.” She remembers going to school unveiled as a child in the 1960s and studying alongside boys. But today, any girl who goes to school is risking her life.

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Human Rights Focus Pakistan(HRFP) has welcomed the reinstatement of deposed Chief Justice Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry and other judges and wrote a letter appealing him to take a sue motu notice on discriminatory laws and their misuse.

The Chief Justice was asked to give special attention the Blasphemy Laws in Pakistan, in particular the following sections of the Pakistan Penal Code 295B & 295C.

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It was a signal moment in Pakistan’s political development: A huge demonstration forced the restoration of a dismissed chief justice, Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry, a symbol of democracy and the rule of law. The army did not stage a coup, but insisted that the government accept a compromise.

The deal between President Asif Ali Zardari and Nawaz Sharif, the leader of the main opposition party, does not herald a solution to the instability of this nuclear-armed nation. Nor does it ensure the Obama administration’s primary objective of tamping down the powerful Islamic insurgency that threatens both Pakistan and Afghanistan.

How the two Pakistani politicians will resolve their rivalry is but one of many uncertainties. Another is whether the domestic political struggle will allow them or the military to focus on their country’s deteriorating security situation.

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Police clashed with stone-throwing protesters today as opposition politician Nawaz Sharif defied a house-arrest order and denounced what he called the government’s creation of a “police state.”

Pakistan’s burgeoning political crisis has alarmed Western governments, who fear the power struggle will sideline efforts to rein in a growing Islamic insurgency. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton separately telephoned Sharif and President Asif Ali Zardari on Saturday in an effort to calm the situation, but street violence was escalating.

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In an effort to defuse the Pakistani political crisis, the American ambassador, Anne W. Patterson, traveled to see the opposition leader Nawaz Sharif to urge him to reconcile with Pakistan’s president, Mr. Sharif said.

Later on Thursday, the Obama administration’s special envoy to Pakistan, Richard C. Holbrooke, spoke by video conference call to Pakistan’s president, Asif Ali Zardari, Mr. Zardari’s office announced. Mr. Holbrooke also spoke to Mr. Sharif by telephone, Mr. Holbrooke’s office said.

The involvement of two senior American officials prompted speculation here that the United States was trying to broker a deal that would ease the standoff between the rivals and end the potential for violence as a coalition of opposition and citizens’ groups prepared for a march that the government had banned.

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The mob was hungry.

Police had stopped hundreds of jobless Pakistanis from marching on the offices of the Faisalabad electric company, which they blamed for daily power outages. So the protesters went after the Treats bakery instead.

They hurled rocks through the windows and stormed the place, beating anyone who tried to stop them, throwing the owner down a flight of stairs, looting the cash register and grabbing cookies, cakes and loaves of bread. “They put their anguish on us,” store manager Muhammad Shafiq recalls. “Whatever food they found, they ate it.”

A month later, some of the windows at Treats haven’t been repaired. Customers have returned, but many employees bear physical scars from the assault. Worst of all, Shafiq fears poverty is rising so fast in this city of 2 million people that conditions are ripe for another riot. “The unrest will continue,” he predicts, “until the problems are solved.”

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With two missile strikes over the past week, the Obama administration has expanded the covert war run by the Central Intelligence Agency inside Pakistan, attacking a militant network seeking to topple the Pakistani government.

The missile strikes on training camps run by Baitullah Mehsud represent a broadening of the American campaign inside Pakistan, which has been largely carried out by drone aircraft. Under President Bush, the United States frequently attacked militants from Al Qaeda and the Taliban involved in cross-border attacks into Afghanistan, but had stopped short of raids aimed at Mr. Mehsud and his followers, who have played less of a direct role in attacks on American troops.

The strikes are another sign that President Obama is continuing, and in some cases extending, Bush administration policy in using American spy agencies against terrorism suspects in Pakistan, as he had promised to do during his presidential campaign. At the same time, Mr. Obama has begun to scale back some of the Bush policies on the detention and interrogation of terrorism suspects, which he has criticized as counterproductive.

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If suicide-murder is deemed legitimate by a community when attacking its “enemies” abroad, it will eventually be used as a tactic against “enemies” at home, and that is exactly what has happened in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan.

The only effective way to stop this trend is for “the village” ”” the Muslim community itself ”” to say “no more.” When a culture and a faith community delegitimizes this kind of behavior, openly, loudly and consistently, it is more important than metal detectors or extra police. Religion and culture are the most important sources of restraint in a society.

That’s why India’s Muslims, who are the second-largest Muslim community in the world after Indonesia’s, and the one with the deepest democratic tradition, do a great service to Islam by delegitimizing suicide-murderers by refusing to bury their bodies. It won’t stop this trend overnight, but it can help over time.

“The Muslims of Bombay deserve to be congratulated in taking this important decision,” Raashid Alvi, a Muslim member of India’s Parliament from the Congress Party, said to me. “Islam says that if you commit suicide, then even after death you will be punished.”

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MR. [DAVID] GREGORY: So what are the biggest challenges he faces now in Afghanistan?

MR. [TOM] RICKS: Well, I think the first thing is to recognize that it’s not really a war in Afghanistan, it’s a war in Afghanistan and Pakistan. As a friend of mine said, it’s hard to win a war in Afghanistan when the enemy wants to fight it in the next country over, Pakistan.

MR. GREGORY: Right. And that’s the Taliban fighting and winning battles in Pakistan. This is where we went to war to take them out of power.

MR. RICKS: And that’s very scary. And our supply lines through Pakistan are being challenged. Bridges are being blown up, American convoys are being attacked. So I think the first thing that Obama will do is begin to look at it as an Afghan-Pakistan war, in which Pakistan is really the more important factor. We could lose in Afghanistan. It would be unhappy, but not, you know, terrible for us. If you lose Pakistan, you end up having the mujahideen, Islamic extremists, with nuclear weapons. And that was a major al-Qaeda goal that we really do not want to see happen. I don’t think that Newsweek got it quite right the other day when they referred to Afghanistan as potentially Obama’s Vietnam. I think potentially Obama’s Vietnam is Pakistan.

Caught this on the way home from worship yesterday on satellite radio. Mr. Ricks’ new book sounds fascinating. Read it all.[/i]