Students protest against the visit of U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, in Lahore, Pakistan, Thursday, Oct. 29, 2009. Clinton is on a three-day state visit to Pakistan.
A soldier kept watch from a Pakistani Army position. The current ground offensive has received wide public support.
U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, left, walks beside Pakistani Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi, at the Iqbal Memorial in Lahore, Pakistan, Thursday, Oct. 29, 2009. Clinton is on a three-day state visit to Pakistan.
Police officers wait for the arrival of U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton at the Government College University, where she will be attending an event, Lahore, Pakistan, Thursday, Oct. 29, 2009. Clinton is on a three-day state visit to Pakistan.
U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, left, stands beside Pakistani Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi at the Iqbal Memorial in Lahore, Pakistan, Thursday, Oct. 29, 2009. Clinton is on a three-day state visit to Pakistan.
In this photo provided by Pakistan Muslim League, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, left, meets Pakistan's former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif in Lahore, Pakistan, Thursday, Oct. 29, 2009. Clinton is on a three-day state visit to Pakistan.
U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, center right, poses for photos beside Pakistani Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi, center left, and two unidentified people in front of the Badshahi Mosque in Lahore, Pakistan, Thursday, Oct. 29, 2009. Clinton is on a three-day state visit to Pakistan.
U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, second right, prays together with Pakistani Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi, right, in front of the grave of the Poet Muhammad Iqbal, at the Iqbal Memorial in Lahore, Pakistan, Thursday, Oct. 29, 2009. Clinton is on a three-day state visit to Pakistan.
Students react against the wind caused by a helicopter at the entrance of the Government College University, while waiting to attend an event with U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, Lahore, Pakistan, Thursday, Oct. 29, 2009. Clinton is on a three-day state visit to Pakistan.
Students protest against the visit of U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, who is on a three-day state visit to the country, Lahore, Pakistan, Thursday, Oct. 29, 2009. The banner in Urdu reads: "Don't transform Pakistan into an American state."
Police officers wait for the arrival of U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton at the Government College University, where she will be attending an event, Lahore, Pakistan, Thursday, Oct. 29, 2009. Clinton is on a three-day state visit to Pakistan.
U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, center, is escorted by Pakistani Rangers at the Iqbal Memorial in Lahore, Pakistan, Thursday, Oct. 29, 2009. Clinton is on a three-day state visit to Pakistan.
Pakistani soldiers at a lookout post in South Waziristan.
Pakistani forces pushing toward a lair of hard-core Taliban fighters found documents this week linked to a member of the Hamburg cell of Al Qaeda that is believed to have planned the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
In a small village in the dun-colored hills of South Waziristan, soldiers found a German passport belonging to Said Bahaji, a German citizen and associate of Mohammed Atta, the leader of the 9/11 hijackers.
The passport was issued in Hamburg in January 2001 and was accompanied by a Pakistani visa dated March 2001. The documents indicated that Mr. Bahaji landed in Karachi from Istanbul on Sept. 4, 2001.
The apparent presence of Mr. Bahaji in the tribal areas of Pakistan is a clear indication that members of the Qaeda network — including participants in the 9/11 plot — have taken refuge here, as American officials, like Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton on Thursday, have charged.
There was no indication that Mr. Bahaji had left Pakistan, authorities said.
Although Mr. Bahaji was not a central plotter in the Sept. 11 attacks, he lived for eight months in Hamburg with Mr. Atta and Ramzi bin al Shibh, according to the 9/11 Commission Report.
He was described in the report as “an insecure follower with no personality and with limited knowledge of Islam.”
It added: “Atta and Binalshibh used Bahaji’s computer for Internet research, as evidenced by documents and diskettes seized by German authorities after 9/11.”
A United States counterterrorism official said the documents “appear to be this guy,” and that American officials believe “he’s in Pakistan and is a senior Qaeda propagandist.” The official spoke anonymously to discuss classified assessments of Al Qaeda.
Soldiers also found a Spanish passport belonging to Raquel Burgos Garcia, who is believed to be Mr. Bahaji’s wife. She wore an Islamic headscarf in her passport photo; an accompanying identity card showed that she had attended school in Morocco.
The documents were shown to reporters on a day trip organized by the army on Thursday for the news media to observe operations in the nearly two-week-old battle. South Waziristan is off limits to foreign reporters, and most Pakistani reporters, without special permission.
The army was using artillery and jet fighters to break the back of the militants. Rounds of artillery thundered around the mountains at midday, and the sound of jets echoed through the valleys.
The offensive in South Waziristan has turned into a battle of wills between the army, the custodian of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons and accustomed to facing archenemy India, and insurgents from the Taliban and Al Qaeda, who are determined to bring down the state.
The guerrillas established a sanctuary here four years ago to plan their operations.
In retaliation, the insurgents have struck with ferocity at Pakistan’s urban centers and military installations using sleeper cells and commando fighters to wreak havoc and fear, killing large numbers of civilians like never before.
The assaults, particularly a car bomb that killed more than 100 people in the narrow alleys of an old bazaar in Peshawar on Wednesday and was aimed at women and children, are interpreted by many Pakistanis as an effort to break the will of the public and turn opinion against the military operation.
The militants, they point out, are not concerned with public support and just want to be left alone in their faraway stronghold, which has become a magnet for foreign militants from diverse backgrounds, according to an array of documents captured in houses by the Pakistani military.
So far, the public appears to be supportive of the army and impatient with the militants, though many Pakistanis ask whether a foreign hand, meaning the United States or India, is behind the militants.
In the past, the army fared poorly in South Waziristan, the southernmost region of the tribal areas where the Taliban and Al Qaeda have operated at will.
In 2005, under the president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, the army forged a peace deal in South Waziristan with Baitullah Mehsud, then the leader of the Pakistani Taliban, in a move that legitimized Mr. Mehsud’s authority with the Mehsud tribesmen.
A series of embarrassing encounters for the military followed. In 2007, the militants seized more than 40 soldiers at their fort at Sararogha and killed most of them.
Last year, the military abandoned its fort at Ladha, another militant stronghold, and the insurgents promptly blew up the British colonial-era structure.
Now the military is trying to recapture its reputation in South Waziristan, and to re-establish its presence. It is doing so with many more soldiers than in past operations in South Waziristan, said Maj. Gen. Athar Abbas, the military spokesman, who ushered reporters around on a M-17 helicopter.
In addition to the militants’ passports, found in the village of Chalvashti, soldiers discovered a small house in a nearby town marked as a “laboratory” that was used for the manufacture of roadside bombs, Brig. Mohammed Shafiq said.
On the top of a rocky outpost called Spin Jamaat in Sherwangai, the commander of the forces in the area, Gen. Khalid Rabbani, sounded a confident note as he surveyed a vast landscape of hills and scarce vegetation. “The terrorists have gone into deeper areas, and the exits are choked,” he said.
But the fact that the insurgents were retreating deeper inside their stronghold around the towns of Makeen, Ladha and Sararogha, near densely forested mountains, may not bode well for the army.
“I am afraid the army is being sucked in and then the terrorists will hit hard using hit-and-run tactics,” said a resident of the Mehsud area recently.
So far, the army has concentrated on taking territory along the main road, a thin ribbon of rock-strewn gravel that was first laid down by the British. The troops have proceeded slowly, even though this roadside terrain was relatively easy, compared to the mountain passages that lay ahead, soldiers said.
The next target, Kuniguram, has served as the headquarters for the Uzbek fighters, the Taliban’s most brutal warriors. The army had surrounded Kuniguram on three sides, General Rabbani said, and clouds of white smoke from artillery fire onto the ridge in front of Kuniguram could be seen in the early afternoon.
The army expected its toughest fight so far to capture Kuniguram, the most substantial town under militant control that it had taken on so far, the general said.
On a separate axis from Kuniguram, the army was approaching Sararogha, the operational hub of the Taliban, General Abbas said.
It appeared, he said, that Wali ur-Rehman, the second in command of the Pakistani Taliban, was directing operations from Sararogha, where the army signed a peace deal with Mr. Mehsud, the former head of the Pakistani Taliban. Mr. Mehsud was killed in an American drone attack in August.
U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton chided Pakistani officials Thursday for failing to press the hunt for al-Qaida inside their borders, suggesting they know where the terror leaders are hiding.
American officials have long said that al-Qaida mastermind Osama bin Laden and senior lieutenants of the network accused in the Sept. 11 attacks operate out of the rugged terrain along the border with Afghanistan.
But Clinton's unusually blunt comments went further in asserting that Pakistan's government has done too little about it.
"I find it hard to believe that nobody in your government knows where they are and couldn't get them if they really wanted to," Clinton said in an interview with Pakistani journalists in Lahore. "Maybe that's the case. Maybe they're not gettable. I don't know."
There was no immediate reaction from Pakistani officials, but the thrust of Clinton's comments were startling, coming after months of lavish public comments from her and other American officials portraying Pakistan's leaders as finally receptive to the war against militants inside their own country.
As a political spouse, career public official and recently as a diplomat, Clinton has long showed a tendency toward bluntness, sometimes followed by a softening of her comments. But her remarks about Pakistan's lack of action against al-Qaida comes at a particularly sensitive moment — amid a major Pakistani offensive against militants and a deadly spate of insurgent violence.
Clinton on Friday was wrapping up her three-day visit to Pakistan with a series of interviews with Pakistani journalists — including a session with women journalists that was to be broadcast live — and talks with leaders of Parliament. Then she was to fly to the Persian Gulf city of Abu Dhabi for meetings with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, to be followed over the weekend by a meeting in Israel with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
With Pakistan reeling from Wednesday's devastating bombing that killed more than 100 people in Peshawar, Clinton also engaged in an intense give-and-take with students at the Government College of Lahore. She insisted that inaction by the government would have ceded ground to terrorists.
"If you want to see your territory shrink, that's your choice," she said, adding that she believed it would be a bad choice.
Richard Holbrooke, the special U.S. representative on Afghanistan and Pakistan, told reporters that Clinton planned to meet late Thursday with the army chief, Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, to get an update on the offensive that began Oct. 17 against Taliban forces in a portion of the tribal areas near the Afghan border.
"We want to encourage them," Holbrooke said of the Pakistanis. "She wants to get a firsthand account of the military situation."
During her exchange with the Pakistani journalists, one reporter asked Clinton why the fight against terrorism seemed to put Pakistan at the center and why other countries couldn't do more. Clinton noted that al-Qaida has launched attacks on Indonesia, the Philippines and many other countries over the years.
"So the world has an interest in seeing the capture and killing of the people who are the masterminds of this terrorist syndicate. As far as we know, they are in Pakistan."
On Clinton's flight to Islamabad after the interview with Pakistani journalists, U.S. Ambassador Anne Patterson said Clinton's remarks approximate what the Obama administration has told Pakistani officials in private.
"We often say, `Yes, there needs to be more focus on finding these leaders,'" Patterson said. "The other thing is, they lost control of much of this territory in recent years, and that's why they're in South Waziristan right now."
In Lahore, dozens of students rushed to line up for the microphone when the session with Clinton began. Their questions were not hostile, but showed a strong sense of doubt that the U.S. could be a reliable and trusted partner for Pakistan.
One woman asked whether the U.S. could be expected to commit long term in Afghanistan after abandoning the country after Russian occupiers retreated in 1989.
"What guarantee," the woman asked, "can Americans give Pakistan that we can now trust you — not you but, like, the Americans this time — of your sincerity and that you guys are not going to betray us like the Americans did in the past when they wanted to destabilize the Russians?"
Clinton responded that the question was a "fair criticism" and that the U.S. did not follow through in the way it should have. "It's difficult to go forward if we're always looking in the rearview mirror," said Clinton, on the second of a three-day visit, her first to Pakistan as secretary of state.
The Peshawar bombing in a market crowded with women and children appeared timed to overshadow her arrival. It was the deadliest attack in Pakistan since 2007.
She likened Pakistan's situation — with Taliban forces taking over substantial swaths of land in the Swat valley and in areas along the Afghan border — to a theoretical advance of terrorists into the United States from across the Canadian border.
It would be unthinkable, she said, for the U.S. government to decide, "Let them have Washington (state)" first, then Montana, then the sparsely populated Dakotas, because those states are far from the major centers of population and power on the East Coast.
Clinton was responding to a student who suggested that Washington was forcing Pakistan to use military force on its own territory.
During her hourlong appearance at the college, Clinton stressed that a key purpose of her trip was to reach out to ordinary Pakistanis and urge a better effort to bridge differences and improve mutual understanding.
But her tough comments about Pakistan's will to take on al-Qaida leaders might not sit well among Pakistanis who long have complained about American demands on their country.
Clinton has ruffled feathers before with blunt comments during international trips. On her first visit to Asia in February, she discussed the possibility of a succession crisis in North Korea and suggested the U.S. would not press China that hard on human rights.
On a later trip, she drew criticism from Israeli leaders for talking about a "defense umbrella" for Arab Gulf states to protect them from a potential nuclear threat from Iran.
Despite her comments during the town hall event in Lahore, Clinton declined to touch on the sensitive issue of missile attacks from U.S. drones against militants inside Pakistan.
The subject has stirred some of the strongest feelings of anti-Americanism in the country, but the U.S. routinely refuses to acknowledge publicly that the attacks are taking place.
"There is a war going on," Clinton said, adding only that the U.S. wants to help Pakistan be successful.
The United States has provided Pakistani commanders with video images and target information from its military drones as the army pushes its ground offensive in Waziristan, U.S. officials said this week.
The U.S. in recent months has rushed helicopters and other military equipment to the country as Islamabad began offensives.
"We've put military assistance to Pakistan on a wartime footing," Lt. Col. Mark Wright, a Pentagon spokesman, said Thursday.
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