In the hidden ravines and forbidding, dust-colored mountains of a remote border region near Afghanistan, about 25,000 Pakistani troops are battling hundreds of well-armed foreign militants and Pakistani tribesmen in an increasingly violent confrontation that is imposing growing costs on civilians and prompting warnings of wider unrest. The government has stepped up the intensity of its attacks in the tribal zone of South Waziristan after a series of failed attempts this year to negotiate the surrender of the foreigners, identified by U.S. and Pakistani officials as being allied with al Qaeda, most of them from Chechnya and Uzbekistan. The ethnic Pashtun population of the region has traditionally paid little heed to dictates from Islamabad.
On Sept. 9, for example, an airstrike and subsequent assault by helicopter gunships on a fortified compound in the Dila Khula district of South Waziristan killed as many as 100 people, including foreign militants and some noncombatants, according to foreign diplomats and reports by Pakistani journalists based in the region.
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