PESHAWAR, PAKISTAN — When government troops pushed their way into a local warlord's stronghold just outside one of Pakistan's major cities over the weekend, what they found followed a familiar pattern.
With plenty of warning from officials that troops were coming, Islamic insurgents in the mountainous Bara district outside Peshawar, the provincial capital, had simply melted away, disappearing into a remote valley to the north.
Pakistani authorities declared Sunday that the district had been restored to their control. But residents said they expected the militants to return whenever it suited them.
What's more, almost no one in Bara's dusty and deprived main town had anything bad to say about the vanished warlord, Mangal Bagh, an illiterate bus driver-turned-cleric. Bagh maintained law and order, people said, and the shadow government he set up in recent months was more effective than the state-sanctioned one.
Even after he and his men had decamped, the black flags of his group, Lashkar-i-Islam, or Army of Islam, still fluttered from homes, schools and government buildings.
The military operation to retake Bara and the rest of the Khyber tribal agency -- home to the Khyber Pass, a key supply route for Western forces across the border in Afghanistan -- was deemed a success by Pakistani authorities, who said Sunday that mopping-up efforts might continue for some days.
At the same time, the assault showed fundamental ambiguities in the government's stance toward Taliban-linked militants who have made the tribal areas their sanctuary. Pakistan's ruling coalition, in office for three months, has sought to strike deals with local Taliban commanders rather than confront them militarily.
However, senior officials said the Khyber offensive did not necessarily mark a break with the notion of choosing negotiations over force when possible. Although the operation involved hundreds of paramilitary Frontier Corps troops backed by tanks, artillery and armored vehicles, representatives of the central government shied away from referring to it as a military offensive.
"This is a purely civilian law-enforcement action," said Rehman Malik, the senior official in the Interior Ministry. The Frontier Corps, a force with career soldiers in command, technically reports to Malik's ministry, a civilian body.
