Taliban Militants

Pakistan launched a military operation against militants Sunday in a district that has been covered under a controversial peace deal with the Taliban, suggesting a tougher line by the government -- at least temporarily. The military said at least 30 militants were killed, including a commander of the banned Tehrik-e-Taliban, a Pakistani umbrella group of extremists, as armed helicopters attacked their positions in the Lower Dir district in northwestern Pakistan.

A suicide bomber at a mosque jammed with worshipers killed at least 40 people and injured 100 Friday in Pakistan's restive tribal region along the Afghan border, one of the deadliest attacks in recent weeks in the country. At least 400 people were in the mosque near the town of Jamrud in the Khyber tribal district when the bomber walked in and detonated his explosives, police and witnesses said. Khyber, the gateway to Afghanistan for NATO supply trucks, remains a stronghold for Taliban militants fighting the U.S.-allied Pakistani government.

Emboldened Taliban fighters imposed control over towns and villages closer to Islamabad on Thursday, raising alarm among foreign governments and many in Pakistan that authorities are ceding swaths of the country's heart to Islamic hard-liners. Authorities dispatched a small paramilitary force from the North-West Frontier Constabulary to the district of Buner, just 60 miles from the capital, where Taliban forces took control of much of the area this week.

The team of Islamist militants knew exactly where the naval base's weak spot was. Dressed in black and armed with AK-47 rifles, grenades and rocket launchers, they crept up to the back wall of Mehran Naval Station in Karachi, keeping clear of security cameras. Then, with just a pair of ladders, they clambered over the wall, cutting through barbed wire at the top, to launch a 17-hour siege that would renew disturbing questions about the Pakistani military's ability to defend sensitive installations, including its nuclear arsenal.

The Pakistani military pounded hide-outs of Taliban militants who had hijacked ammunition supply trucks, killing as many as 30 suspected rebels, the army said. Two paramilitary troops were killed and 10 wounded in clashes around Dara Adam Khel, on a key strategic route. The route connects Peshawar -- the army's regional headquarters 25 miles away -- with the battlefields of Waziristan, regarded as a Taliban and Al Qaeda stronghold. President Pervez Musharraf, who is touring Europe, dismissed a U.S. offer to send a small number of American troops to Pakistan to help fight the insurgency.

KABUL — Taliban militants struck in the heart of the Afghan capital today, launching suicide attacks on key government targets in a clear sign the insurgents plan to escalate their fight as the U.S. and its allies ramp up a campaign to end the war. At least five people, including a child, were killed and nearly 40 wounded, officials said. The Defense Ministry said seven attackers also had been killed. After a series of blasts and more than three hours of subsequent gunfights outside several ministries and inside a shopping mall, President Hamid Karzai said security had been restored to the capital, though search operations continued amid reports that more attackers were hiding in the city.

In Karachi's Baldia neighborhood, a working-class mix of Pashtun and other Pakistanis, it took an accidental explosion amid piles of suicide vests and grenades to unearth a cell of Taliban militants in a house that neighbors believed sheltered a quiet Pashtun family. "We thought they were fruit sellers," said Mohammed Zahid, 24, who lives across the path from the heavily damaged house. Police said the Jan. 8 blast killed seven Taliban militants who had been planning to attack a Baldia police training center.

Airstrikes on a cave complex near Afghanistan's border with Pakistan killed four Taliban militants and destroyed a truck loaded with rockets, the U.S. military said. Military officials in Pakistan at first said that helicopters had fired into Pakistan and that officials had opened an investigation into whether U.S. aircraft were involved. But Maj. Gen. Shaukat Sultan, Pakistan's top army spokesman, later said no missiles had landed in Pakistan.

Taliban militants stormed the office of an Afghan relief organization early Sunday, killing three workers and wounding four police officers, officials said. Police said six vehicles carrying about 30 gunmen raced up to the office of the Voluntary Assn. for Rehabilitation of Afghanistan in Delaram, a town in the southwestern province of Nimruz. "A cook, a night watchman and another employee were asleep in the first room," said Najmudin Mojadedi, the group's executive director.

Reporting from Islamabad, Pakistan, and Peshawar, Pakistan -- A suicide bombing at a crowded courthouse in Peshawar killed 19 people Thursday, the 10th such attack in six weeks for a city bearing the brunt of retaliation from Taliban militants battling Pakistani troops along the Afghan border. Now in its fifth week, Pakistan's military offensive has succeeded in retaking much of the ground held by Taliban and Al Qaeda fighters in South Waziristan, for years the militants' primary stronghold.

A car bomb blast targeted two U.S. consulate vehicles in the northwest city of Peshawar on Friday, killing a Pakistani bystander and slightly injuring Americans inside the cars. Pakistani police officials said the car, a parked Suzuki filled with 110 pounds of explosives, was detonated by remote control. U.S. Embassy spokesman Alberto Rodriguez said the explosion damaged one of the two armored vehicles. The two-car convoy, headed from Peshawar's University Town neighborhood to the consulate, was not carrying any high-ranking officials.

In three separate attacks Thursday, suicide bombers targeted Afghan police and government officials, killing three Afghan police and injuring a half dozen bystanders. Several would-be suicide bombers teamed up to attack an Afghan police training center Thursday morning in Aryub Jaji, a border town in eastern Paktia province, according to spokesmen for NATO forces and the Paktia governor's office. After the attackers exchanged fire with Afghan forces at the center, some fled, one was shot before he could enter the training compound and another detonated a bomb at the center's front gate, according to Rohullah Samoon, a spokesman for the Paktia governor.

The U.S. has stopped the Taliban's momentum in Afghanistan, the general leading that war told Congress on Tuesday morning, and key senators agreed that the goal of handing off security responsibilities to Afghan forces by 2014 is achievable. "The past eight months have seen important but hard-fought progress in Afghanistan," Gen. David H. Petraeus told the Senate Armed Services Committee as he testified alongside Michele Flournoy, the undersecretary of Defense for policy. "Key insurgent save havens have been taken away from the Taliban, numerous insurgent leaders have been killed or captured, and hundreds of reconcilable midlevel leaders and fighters have been reintegrated into Afghan society.

When Gen. David H. Petraeus appears before Congress on Tuesday to tout progress in Afghanistan, he will face a series of pessimistic assessments about the state of the war, including the intelligence community's conclusion that tactical gains achieved by a U.S. troop surge have failed to fundamentally weaken the Taliban. A year after the launch of a revamped counterinsurgency strategy, several major obstacles persist: The government of President Hamid Karzai is viewed as corrupt and ineffective, the Taliban exhibits a fierce will to fight, and the enemy enjoys safe havens in the tribal areas of Pakistan that drone strikes can disrupt but not eliminate, according to public U.S. intelligence assessments.

U.S. Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates on Friday warned allies against "ill-timed, precipitous or uncoordinated" drawdowns of their troops from Afghanistan that could harm gains made against Taliban militants. Gates aimed to discourage allies in Europe from using the Obama administration's plans to withdraw some troops beginning in July as a pretext to bring out large numbers of their own forces. The planned withdrawals are expected to be a small percentage of the overall U.S. force, but if allies with only a few thousand soldiers or fewer bring out similar numbers it could cause problems, officials said.

American and Pakistani intelligence services have become deeply estranged in recent weeks after several high-profile disputes, though senior officials from both countries say they continue to cooperate against Al Qaeda militants. The disclosure this week that Raymond Davis, the 36-year-old American who shot dead two Pakistani men in Lahore last month, was a CIA contractor working under cover was the latest episode to exacerbate mistrust between the two countries' spy agencies. In December, the CIA station chief in Pakistan had to leave the country after his identity became public.

A retired Pakistani intelligence agent regarded as an architect behind the rise of the Taliban in Afghanistan died after being held hostage by militants for 10 months, though officials in northwestern Pakistan said they had yet to determine whether his captors killed him or he died of natural causes. Sultan Amir Tarar, known throughout Pakistan as Colonel Imam, was kidnapped by militants last spring along with another former Pakistani spy, Khalid Khawaja, and a British television journalist.