Pakistan rejects call to contest president

Pakistan claims to have killed two senior members of al-Qaida.
KUNDI GHAR, Pakistan (AP) -- Pakistan on Saturday dismissed a call by al-Qaida's No. 2 leader, Ayman al-Zawahri, for the army to turn against the president, calling it an attempt to boost the flagging morale of the terror group.
Maj. Gen. Shaukat Sultan, the chief army spokesman, said al-Zawahri's comments in a video posted on an Islamic Web site Saturday were triggered by the killing this month of two senior al-Qaida operatives near the Afghan border.
In the video, the Egyptian deputy of Osama bin Laden told Pakistani army soldiers and officers that President Gen. Pervez Musharraf was "throwing them into the burner of civil war in return for the bribes he is getting from the United States" -- a reference to his support of the U.S. war on terror.
"This statement is basically aimed at boosting the sagging morale of al-Qaida that appears to be going down after the killing of two important al-Qaida figures," Sultan told reporters in North Waziristan, the heart of Pakistan's battle against Islamic militancy in its border regions.
Reported deaths
Sultan pointed to Pakistan's alleged success in killing Mohsin Musa Matawalli Atwah, an Egyptian on the FBI's list of most-wanted terrorists, in a raid in North Waziristan on April 12. His body has not been found.
Pakistan also claims to have killed a Syrian, Marwan Hadid al-Suri, said to be behind attacks on Pakistani forces and U.S. forces in eastern Afghanistan on April 20 in the Bajur tribal region.
Yet there are signs that Pakistan's military is struggling to combat a wave of pro-Taliban militancy in North Waziristan that the army says has left 324 militants and 56 soldiers dead since July 2005. Most of those casualties came in a spate of fighting in the past two months.
This week, Musharraf warned of the "Talibanization" of the troubled region, despite more than two years of intensive military operations to root out militants and development works to win the hearts and minds of local tribesmen.
Attacks
At the mountaintop army outpost of Kundi Ghar, where North Waziristan abuts Afghanistan's eastern Paktika province, commanding Brig. Imitaz Wyne said his 5,000 forces had virtually sealed a 22-mile stretch of the border -- to prevent attacks on U.S.-led coalition forces in the neighboring country -- but were facing increasing assaults from inside Pakistan.
He said the militants they face include Afghans who settled in Pakistan after the anti-Soviet jihad, or holy war, in the 1980s; foreigners, including Central Asians and Arabs; local tribesmen; and criminals on the run from other parts of Pakistan.
"It's difficult to say which groups they come from. Ultimately the leaders are from al-Qaida," said Wyne at the 10,300-foot-high outpost, where army soldiers manned machine guns in stone bunkers in a pine forest.
He said that in the past month, his forces had faced four or five major attacks, including one April 4 at Shatghalai, when about 150 militants attacking from three different directions had overrun a military post about 13 miles from the border.
The army retaliated with Cobra helicopter gunships, killing about 40 militants, he said.
Maj. Gen. Akram Sahi, the top commander in North Waziristan, said Pakistan was increasingly using air power against the militants, who he said were led by four or five local Islamic clerics.
He said there are currently about 45,000 troops in North Waziristan, and he bristled at suggestions that his mission there was in trouble.
"If someone says that there is no writ of government here, it hurts me," he said at his fortified headquarters at the main town in the region, Miran Shah. "I am here to kill anyone who is a suspected terrorist."
Yet the growing role of tribesmen in the rebellion is a cause for Pakistani concern, as is the prominence of the hard-line clerics, who have eclipsed tribal elders as local power brokers. Some of them have called for a jihad against the Pakistan army.
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