Is Pakistan Serious?

Pakistan's effort 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 more 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 point out that Pakistan has a habit of announcing dramatic antiterror moves to coincide with high-level meetings with American officials. At the time of the raid, President Pervez Musharraf had just returned from the U.N. 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 earlier had questioned whether Musharraf had the support of the entire Pakistani military, was preparing a trip to Islamabad.

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Sultan insisted that the raid was based on intelligence and "was not at all to please the Americans or anyone else." Nor, he said, was it a response to the release of a tape last week 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 terror: "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, also said the raid may be evidence of a "renewed resolve" in Islamabad to fight it out in its tribal regions. If so, this will be welcome news to U.S. troops. Three days before the raid, an American soldier was killed in a skirmish with suspected Taliban guerrillas just across the border.