Pakistan's prime minister said the government, which is in the midst of an anti-Taliban offensive, has no choice but to wipe out the militants.
"We are at war," Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani told a press conference in the city of Peshawar, where a militant car bombing earlier this week killed more than 115 people. "Our civil leadership, our military leadership and political leadership ... we are on the same page that we have to fight the militancy. We do not have any other option because their intentions are to take over" the country.
Pakistan, which years ago helped nurture the Taliban's rise in neighboring Afghanistan, is now involved in an escalating fight with its own Taliban fighters. Two weeks ago, Pakistan launched the offensive in South Waziristan, viewed as the main stronghold in the country of both the Taliban and al-Qaida. The offensive has caused retaliatory militant attacks across the country.
On Saturday, the paramilitary soldiers were traveling through the Khyber region, famed for the pass that is the main route for ferrying supplies to U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, when the bomb went off, said local official Ghulam Farooq Khan. The men died before they reached a hospital.
That attack came as Pakistani jets bombed three hideouts of Pakistani Taliban leader Hakimullah Mehsud in the Orkazai tribal region, killing at least eight militants and wounding several others, intelligence officials said. Another airstrike, about 43 miles (70 kilometers) from the first one and near the Afghan border, killed seven militants in the Kurram tribal region, the officials said.
Access to the tribal areas, semiautonomous regions where the Pakistani government has long had only minimal control, is heavily restricted, and independently verifying government reports is all but impossible.
Pakistan appears eager to prove that it is moving aggressively against the militants after a three-day visit earlier this week by U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton.
