Is Pakistan Serious?

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Pakistan's campaign to hunt down suspected Taliban and al-Qaeda guerrillas in the rugged territory bordering Afghanistan scored a major success last week with a raid by the Pakistani army in the country's South Waziristan district. Eight suspected militants were killed and 18 were detained--all foreigners and "certainly terrorists," said military spokesman Major General Shaukat Sultan. "As a matter of policy, Pakistan is determined to root out terrorism from its soil."

But is it? Skeptics note that Pakistan has a habit of announcing dramatic antiterrorism moves to coincide with high-level meetings with U.S. officials. At the time of the raid, President Pervez Musharraf had recently returned from U.N. headquarters in New York City, Prime Minister Mir Zafarullah Khan Jamali was meeting with President Bush in Washington, and Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, who had earlier questioned whether Musharraf had the support of the entire Pakistani military, was preparing a trip to Islamabad.

Sultan insisted that the raid was "not at all to please the Americans or anyone else." Nor, he said, was it a response to last week's release of a tape in which Osama bin Laden's deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, called for the overthrow of Musharraf's government. A Western diplomat in Islamabad also viewed the raid--which involved hundreds of Pakistani soldiers, two of whom were killed--as an indication that Pakistan is getting more serious in the fight against terrorism: "It was quite a bold move, because this is an area where the government has rarely operated." Security analyst Talat Masood, a retired lieutenant general in the Pakistani army, said the raid may be evidence of a "renewed resolve" in Islamabad to fight it out in Pakistan's tribal regions. If so, this will be welcome news to U.S. troops. Three days before the raid, an American soldier was killed just across the border in a skirmish with suspected Taliban guerrillas. --By Phil Zabriskie. With reporting by Ghulam Hasnain