ISLAMABAD: Pakistani soldiers closed in on two major Taleban strongholds in South Waziristan on Saturday, officials said, as government jets pounded insurgent hide-outs and the prime minister said the country had no choice but to defeat the militants.
“We are at war,” Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani told a press conference in the city of Peshawar, where a militant car bombing a few days ago killed more than 115 people.
“Our civil leadership, our military leadership and political leadership ... we are on the same page that we have to fight the militancy. We do not have any other option because their intentions are to take over” the country.
Pakistan, which years ago helped nurture the Taleban’s rise in neighboring Afghanistan, is now involved in an escalating fight with the militants. Two weeks ago, the government launched the offensive in the South Waziristan tribal region, viewed as the main stronghold in the country of both the Taleban and Al-Qaeda. The offensive has drawn retaliatory militant attacks across Pakistan.
On Saturday, seven paramilitary soldiers driving through the Khyber tribal area were killed in a roadside bomb planted by suspected Taleban militants, said local official Ghulam Farooq Khan.
The area is famed for the Khyber pass, the main route for ferrying supplies to US and NATO forces in Afghanistan.
That attack came as Pakistani jets bombed three hide-outs of Pakistani Taleban leader Hakimullah Mehsud in the Orkazai tribal region, killing at least eight militants and wounding several others, intelligence officials said.
Authorities have effectively sealed off the tribal areas, semiautonomous regions where the central government in Islamabad has long had only minimal authority, and it is all but impossible to independently verify such claims.
Pakistan appears eager to prove that it is moving aggressively against the militants after a three-day visit earlier this week by US Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton.
Clinton said she found it “hard to believe” that no one in Pakistan’s government knew where Al-Qaeda’s leadership was hiding and warned that once the current offensive is finished, “the Pakistanis will have to go on to try to root out other terrorist groups, or we’re going to be back facing the same threats.”
Pakistan has publicly reacted to Clinton’s chiding with a mixture of acceptance and resentment.
“If we are honest, we cannot deny that much of what she said was true,” The News newspaper said in a Saturday editorial, but added that US policies — like foreign policy anywhere — stem from self-interest.
“There is nothing noble about Washington’s focus on Islamabad. But it is possible that at this particular moment in history the interests of both nations coincide,” the newspaper said.
