Missiles fired by U.S. drones killed 16 people, including Pakistani and Afghan Taliban fighters, on Monday in a strike targeting a religious school founded by an old friend of Osama bin Laden, intelligence officials and Pakistani villagers said.
 
The missiles hit a sprawling complex comprising a house and a religious school or madrasa founded by Taliban commander Jalaluddin Haqqani near Miranshah, the main town of North Waziristan tribal region on the Afghan border.

Ten militants and a sister, a sister-in-law and two nieces of Haqqani as well as two children were killed in the attack, residents said.

"There were two drones and they fired three missiles," said a resident of Dandi Darpakheil, the village which was hit.
Haqqani is a veteran commander of the U.S.-backed Afghan war against the Soviet invasion in the 1970s and 1980s, and his links with bin Laden go back to the late 1980s.

He is said to be in ill-health and his son, Sirajuddin, has been leading the Haqqani group.
"They belonged to Sirajuddin Haqqani group," said an intelligence officer, speaking on condition of anonymity, referring to the militants killed in the attack.

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(ISI).

The New York Times reported in July that the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency had given Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani evidence of the ISI's involvement with Haqqani, along with evidence of ISI connections to a suicide bombing at the Indian embassy in Kabul that killed nearly 60 people on July 7.

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U.S.-led forces recently stepped up cross-border attacks against al Qaeda and Taliban targets in Pakistani tribal areas.

Helicopter-borne commandos carried out a ground assault in South Waziristan last Wednesday, the first known incursion into Pakistan by U.S. troops since the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan.

Pakistani officials said 20 people, including women and children, were killed in the attack which drew a furious response from the government and stoked anti-American sentiment.

A day later, four Islamist militants were killed and five wounded in a suspected U.S. drone attack in North Waziristan.
Security officials said five people were killed in another drone attack on Friday, but the Pakistan military denied it.

Anger over the U.S. commando raid and repeated territorial violations prompted the government to partially block supply lines to Western forces in landlocked Afghanistan on Saturday.
Rehman Malik, the top Interior Ministry official, said on Monday the road was unblocked after a few hours, and that it had only been shut for security reasons, contrary to earlier comments by the defence minister that it was a response to the violations.

Separately, the army killed 10 militants in clashes in the northwestern Swat Valley on Sunday night, while police arrested a teenaged suicide bomber who had planned to attack army installations in the northwestern garrison town of Nowshera.

Thirty people were killed in a suicide car bomb attack in the nearby city of Peshawar on Saturday.

Is it the influence of Musharaff's departure?

Afghan President Hamid Karzai backed a proposed U.S. strategy on Thursday to hit al Qaeda and Taliban militants in neighboring Pakistan, but NATO said it would not join any cross-border U.S. raids.
 
Pakistan's army chief General Ashfaq Kayani has said his country would not allow foreign troops to conduct operations on its soil, warning that Pakistan's sovereignty would be defended "at all cost."

But The New York Times reported that President George W. Bush secretly approved orders in July allowing U.S. special forces to carry out ground assaults inside Pakistan without approval from the Pakistan government.

It said Bush's orders reflect concern about safe havens for al Qaeda and the Taliban inside Pakistan and an American view that Pakistan lacks the will and ability to combat militants.

"The situation in the tribal areas is not tolerable," the Times quoted a senior U.S. official as saying. "We have to be more assertive. Orders have been issued."

Helicopter-borne U.S. commandos carried out a ground assault in Pakistan's South Waziristan, a sanctuary for al Qaeda operatives, last week, the first known incursion into Pakistan by U.S. troops since the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan. The raid killed 20 people, including women and children.

U.S. Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said on Wednesday he was "looking at a new, more comprehensive strategy" that would cover both sides of the Afghan-Pakistani border.

Karzai faces an intensified insurgency in Afghanistan and has advocated hot-pursuit missions into Pakistan before. At a news conference in Kabul on Thursday he backed Mullen's shift.

"Change of strategy is essential," Karzai said. "It means that we go to those areas which are the training bases and havens of (terrorists) and we jointly go there and remove and destroy them."

FIERCE CLASHES

Pakistan's U.S. ambassador, Husain Haqqani, disputed the Times article and said in any case such an authorization was not binding on his country.

"In our bilateral discussions, no such idea has been mooted and will certainly not be accepted by Pakistan," he told Reuters in an interview. "Pakistan would not accept foreign troops. This is not the best way to pursue the war against terror."

A senior Pakistani official, who asked not to be named, said unilateral U.S. military action would only further antagonize Pakistanis, especially if civilians were accidentally killed as has happened in past raid.

"You go in, you kill a few villagers, you don't know who the heck you're killing ... A cowboy approach is only going to antagonize Pakistanis," the official said.

In the latest fighting in Pakistan's northwestern Bajaur region, close to the Afghan border, Pakistani security forces killed up to 100 al Qaeda-linked militants in fierce clashes, a security official said.

"Eighty to 100 militants were killed in Bajaur today. Most of them are foreigners," the official said on condition of anonymity.

Troops have killed more than 600 militants in Bajaur since August, the government says.

Militants in Bajaur, where some analysts believe top al Qaeda leaders are hiding, regularly cross into Afghanistan to attack Western troops and government forces there.

NATO, which leads a force of some 53,000 troops in Afghanistan alongside a separate U.S. force, said it would not take part in raids into Pakistan.

"The NATO policy, that is our mandate, ends at the border," spokesman James Appathurai said. "There are no ground or air incursions by NATO forces into Pakistani territory."

Some Pakistani analysts say a frustrated U.S. administration wants to score points before a November election but it risks sparking an uprising among ethnic Pashtuns.

"We will convince the U.S. that it can get nothing through unilateral action in tribal areas except opposition of the masses," Haqqani was reported telling the BBC.

Last week's U.S. attack also complicates the situation for Pakistan's new civilian president, Asif Ali Zardari, who was sworn in on Tuesday, having forced former army chief Pervez Musharraf to stand down last month after nine years in power.

The U.S.-led campaign against militancy is unpopular in Pakistan. Zardari is seen as close to the United States but, as an elected civilian leader, he cannot ignore public opinion.

The new government in Islamabad says it is committed to the campaign against militancy, launched after the September 11 attacks seven years ago, but bans incursions by U.S. troops

Pakistani troops have fired shots into the air to stop US troops crossing into the South Waziristan region of Pakistan, local officials say.