PAKISTAN - The Fight Against Tribal Opponents.

In his military campaign against tribal opponents in the remote regions of North and South Waziristan, on the Afghan border, Gen. Musharraf is mixing aid with collective punishments, in order to exert maximum pressure. Those who co-operate - by informing the authorities about, or handing Al-Qaeda or Taliban suspects over to the Pakistani forces - receive aid through social projects, like schools or hospitals, roads and communications, etc. Most of the big projects are partly funded by the US. Punishments include house demolitions, the sealing of shops of businesses, seizure of vehicles and dismissals from government jobs. For example, the Ahmadzai Wazir tribe was fined $95,000 under a local law of collective responsibility for failing to stop rocket attacks against Pakistani forces.

These tribal areas are very difficult terrain for Pakistani forces to operate. Much of the population on the Pakistani side of the border is angry at what it sees as the "infidel [US] occupation" of Afghanistan and at Musharraf's co-operation with the Americans. Like the British before them, post-independence Pakistani governments had until last year found it easier to let the fiercely independent border tribes rule themselves.

In July 2003, for the first time since the creation of Pakistan in 1947, government troops entered the Tirah valley in the Khyber tribal region, the Shawal valley in North Waziristan, and the Mohmand Agency area. The total number of Pakistani government forces deployed on the border since late September 2001 has fluctuated between 70,000 and 125,000, depending on the intensity of the hunt for Al-Qaeda and Taliban fugitives. They include the Army's well-equipped Quick Reaction Force (QRF), consisting of elite commandoes with helicopter gunships and heavy artillery. Since the spring of 2004 and in co-ordination with US forces on the Afghan side of the border, Musharraf's QRF has been focusing on South Waziristan - as well as parts of North Waziristan where the suspects have also been located.

A Chinese engineer held hostage by Al-Qaeda-linked militants in South Waziristan was killed on Oct. 14 and his companion wounded in a QRF rescue operation that killed their five kidnappers. Chinese engineers Wang Ende and Wang Peng were working on a dam project there for state-run Chinese firm Sino Hydro Corp. when they were kidnapped in the South Waziristan tribal region on Oct. 9. The QRF operation was carried out by commandos disguised as a tribal delegation. The kidnappers comprised three Uzbeks and two militants from South Waziristan's Mehsud tribe. The kidnappers, with explosives strapped to their bodies, had been holed up in a mud house surrounded by security forces and their tribal allies in the Chagmalai area of South Waziristan, about 330 km south-west of Islamabad.

China - a traditional ally of Pakistan, supplying it with arms and hundreds of millions of dollars in development finance - had urged Islamabad to do its utmost to rescue the engineers. It had also called on Pakistan to increase security for their co-workers. In May, three Chinese technicians working on a port project were killed and nine wounded in a bomb attack in the southern Pakistani city of Gawadar.

The kidnap operation was led by an Al-Qaeda-linked tribesman named Abdullah Mehsud, a former inmate of the US military prison at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba. Abdullah, hiding at a separate location from the kidnappers, first threatened to order the killing of one of the hostages unless the kidnappers and the hostages were allowed to join him. The QRF assault came after efforts by members of Abdullah's Mehsud tribe, including some of his relatives, failed to persuade him to order the release of the hostages. Abdullah had demanded an end to military operations in the tribal region, where hundreds have been killed this year in battles between troops and Al Qaeda-linked militants. He also wanted the release of two Uzbek militants. He was among 26 prisoners freed from the US prison at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba in March 2004 after the Pentagon said they were no longer a threat to the US.