Pakistan lets US troops conduct raids in frontier

WASHINGTON -- Pakistan has dramatically stepped up its assistance to the US-led campaign to capture Osama bin Laden, deploying thousands of troops into its lawless northwestern frontier, pressuring tribal elders, and allowing American soldiers from neighboring Afghanistan to make forays across the border, according to senior Pentagon and Pakistani officials.

The new cooperation has led to the largest joint effort to date to defeat former Taliban and Al Qaeda leaders, they said.

Pakistan's government has had little presence until now in the harsh, desolate region along the Afghan-Pakistani border, where bin Laden and other fugitives are believed to be hiding. It has also adamantly opposed US soldiers entering the region, fearing that such incursions would set off protests that could destabilize the regime of President Pervez Musharraf.

Now, however, Pentagon officials say that cross-border US patrols are more frequent and that Pakistan often allows the US forces to pursue suspects into its territory. US raiding parties enter the country almost every week, according to US military officials and military reports viewed by the Globe, although the Pakistani government officially denies it.

The raids into Pakistani terrority have netted suicide attackers building bicycle bombs and guerrillas wiring remote-controlled explosives, along with weapons caches designed to help destabilize the US-led reconstruction of Afghanistan, the reports said. One US soldier and two Afghan allies were killed in attacks along the border last week, and more than a dozen others were injured.

The officials said a better political climate in the ethnic Pashtun tribal areas in Pakistan, improving weather, and the enhanced ability of Pakistani forces to operate in the terrain have combined to mark a watershed for the US-Pakistani battle to defeat the Taliban and Al Qaeda.

"The army is oriented, the physical terrain has been overcome, and now we are mounting operations," Pakistani Army Brigadier General Shafqaat Ahmed, the country's senior military official in Washington, said in an interview yesterday. "For the first time in our history, the Pakistani Army is in those areas" in any significant number.

Bush administration officials describe the increased US and Pakistani activity as the first signs of the "spring offensive" planned against Al Qaeda leaders, which has fueled greater optimism in Washington that the mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, his top deputy Ayman Al Zawahiri, and Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar will be captured or killed in the coming months.

In a sign that the need for Pakistan's help in the hunt for bin Laden has taken on more urgency, the White House offered only token protests of Musharraf's pardon of scientist A. Q. Khan, who sold nuclear secrets to such US enemies as North Korea and Libya. Also, the United States has offered personal security advice to Musharraf as he begins renewed negotiations with archrival India.

"There's still unfinished business in this part of the world, and we're making every effort here during the coming months to close those efforts out," Army Lieutenant General David Barno, the senior US military commander, told reporters from Bagram Air Base near the Afghan capital of Kabul last week.

Meanwhile, the United States has taken advantage of the stepped-up Pakistani activity and shifted its own tactics, positioning small military teams in Afghan border towns as part of a new campaign that is expected to grow bolder in the coming months, the officials said.

Companies and platoons of no more than 100 soldiers "own specific large chunks" of the countryside, Barno said, likening the new strategy to one of a "classical counterinsurgency." US troops "stay in those areas, operate continuously out of those areas, [and] maintain and develop relations with the tribal leaders, with the mullahs, with the local government officials."

One day last week, according to US military field reports, American forces stationed on the Afghan side of the border captured eight suspected enemy fighters. On the same day, they also uncovered six caches of weapons, including two that were turned over by locals. "During the day we help rebuild the country, and at night we conduct raids," said a senior US military official who asked not to be named. He said that, in some recent raids, US forces have crossed over the largely unmarked border into Pakistan to capture or kill Taliban sympathizers.

In a tactic known as "hammer and anvil," the United States seeks to pursue suspects as they cross the border and head into the mountains, where Pakistani forces capture or kill them. Pakistani forces will sometimes force Taliban or Al Qaeda fugitives to cross back into US-controlled territory, where they will confront US forces.

Ahmed, the Pakistani general, said in a telephone interview that his army has only recently been in a position to operate in the remote areas along the 1,700-mile border with Afghanistan, which for hundreds of years has been almost entirely self-governing.

But the Pakistan Army has spent the last few years learning its way around the area and attempting to win the confidence of the eight major tribes that live in the northwest frontier, building roads and providing other benefits from Islamabad.

Government officials have then sought to use their leverage with tribal leaders to persuade them to turn over any Taliban or Al Qaeda adherents who may be hiding in the area.

Some of the tactics have been harsh, US and Pakistani officials said, including razing homes of families believed to be abetting Taliban or Al Qaeda holdouts.

"We have been trying to bring up an intelligence network," Ahmed said. "You have to have excellent intelligence. It has taken us a while to create that capability."

The senior US military official added that up until a few months ago, Pakistani forces would often show up in an outlying village and everyone would be gone because the locals were tipped off beforehand.

"The Pakistanis' operational security is much better," he said.

Michael O'Hanlon, a defense specialist at the Brookings Institution in Washington, said it appears that the United States and Pakistan are trying to mirror the successful American operation to capture deposed Iraqi president Saddam Hussein last December.

"They constructed these intelligence networks and established a big web of people and go from piece to piece to piece to find the big prize," he said. "You do the same here with people who know people or might know people who have ties to bin Laden."