By Charlotte McDonald-Gibson (AFP) – Jun 15, 2009

ISLAMABAD (AFP) — Pakistan's army will face huge hurdles in its push to crush the Taliban in tribal areas, where militants are entrenched in a hostile terrain and slip easily across the Afghan frontier, analysts say.

A government official vowed Sunday an all-out onslaught against Pakistan Taliban chief Baitullah Mehsud and his lieutenants in the wild tribal belt, ratcheting up a seven-week-long northwest offensive against the rebels.

But to dislodge Taliban and Al-Qaeda rebels from their mountain sanctuaries, Pakistan must work with the Afghan and US militaries, experts say, or risk the rebels evaporating into hideouts over the border.

Hasan Askari, a visiting professor at Johns Hopkins University, said taking on the Taliban in tribal zones where the government holds little sway will pose a much greater challenge than the Swat valley campaign.

"Unless the Pakistan-Afghanistan border is sealed, unless the movement across the border is tightly controlled, when you take action on the Pakistani side these groups have a tendency to go to the Afghan side," he told AFP.

"And if you take action in Afghanistan they all come to Pakistan, so this is another dimension which Pakistanis and Americans will have to take care of."

Washington and Kabul have long pressured Islamabad to take action along its border against Islamist extremists, who for decades had the backing of Pakistan's intelligence agency keen for influence in Afghanistan.

The United States government alleges that Taliban and Al-Qaeda fighters are holed up in the tribal areas, infiltrating Afghanistan and plotting fresh attacks on Western targets.

On the other side of the border, some 90,000 foreign troops and the fledgling Afghan forces are struggling to quash an insurgency by the resurgent Taliban, which was ousted from government by a US-led invasion in 2001.

Bordering Pakistan's tribal Waziristan district are Afghanistan's eastern Paktika and Khost provinces, both regularly rocked by militant violence.

Haroun Mir, an analyst from the Afghanistan Centre for Research and Policy Studies in Kabul, said the timing of a Pakistan campaign could coincide with Afghanistan's second presidential election in August.

"The Americans pushed the Pakistanis... From now until August they want to make sure those areas are secured for people to be able to vote," he said.

"From the Afghan side of the border the NATO and US and Afghan forces will also launch military operations in order to squeeze the Taliban between the two forces," he added.

Compounding the problem is the tenuous influence the government has in the tribal belt's seven districts -- the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) -- and the rugged mountain terrain.

Local government and law and order are run by tribal councils, with many sympathetic to the Taliban because of ethnic ties.

"The challenges posed to the Pakistan military in the border areas are much the same as they were for the British colonialists" in the 19th century, said Clive Williams, a terrorism expert at the Australian National University.

"The tribespeople see the Pakistan military as outsiders."

Army offensives and shaky peace deals with Mehsud over the last four years have stuttered, with militant-linked attacks instead spiralling.

More than 1,995 people have been killed in attacks since July 2007, with many claimed by or blamed on Mehsud's Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan.

Mehsud, however, remains elusive, despite a five-million-dollar bounty offered by the United States government, which has labelled him "a key Al-Qaeda facilitator in the tribal areas of South Waziristan."

Quite what form an offensive in the tribal belt will take is also unclear.

A northwest provincial governor announced the "full-fledged" campaign across FATA, but the army has so far stayed silent on the issue, with only a handful of targeted strikes in the tribal belt so far.

Security forces say they are close to victory in Swat and have killed about 1,440 militants since the offensive began -- but some are concerned that the army would be overreaching in Waziristan.

"We should not open up another front before we complete the Swat operation," said Brigadier Mahmood Shah, the former security chief for FATA.

"This operation is going to be very tough -- we need a comprehensive strategy and preparations."

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