Pakistan says soldiers close in on Taliban bases

ISLAMABAD (AP) — Pakistani soldiers closed in on two major Taliban strongholds in South Waziristan on Saturday, officials said, as government jets pounded insurgent hide-outs and the prime minister said the country had no choice but to defeat the militants.

"We are at war," Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani told a press conference in the city of Peshawar, where a militant car bombing a few days ago killed more than 115 people. "Our civil leadership, our military leadership and political leadership ... we are on the same page that we have to fight the militancy. We do not have any other option because their intentions are to take over" the country.

Pakistan, which years ago helped nurture the Taliban's rise in neighboring Afghanistan, is now involved in an escalating fight with the militants. Two weeks ago, the government launched the offensive in the South Waziristan tribal region, viewed as the main stronghold in the country of both the Taliban and al-Qaida. The offensive has drawn retaliatory militant attacks across Pakistan.

On Saturday, seven paramilitary soldiers driving through the Khyber tribal area were killed in a roadside bomb planted by suspected Taliban militants, said local official Ghulam Farooq Khan. The area is famed for the Khyber pass, the main route for ferrying supplies to U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan.

That attack came as Pakistani jets bombed three hide-outs of Pakistani Taliban leader Hakimullah Mehsud in the Orkazai tribal region, killing at least eight militants and wounding several others, intelligence officials said. Another airstrike, about 40 miles (70 kilometers) from the first and near the Afghan border, killed seven militants in the Kurram tribal region, the officials said.

The veracity of the reports could not be confirmed. Authorities have effectively sealed off the tribal areas, semiautonomous regions where the central government in Islamabad has long had only minimal authority, and it is all but impossible to independently verifying such claims.

Pakistan appears eager to prove that it is moving aggressively against the militants after a three-day visit earlier this week by U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Clinton said she found it "hard to believe" that no one in Pakistan's government knew where al-Qaida's leadership was hiding and warned that once the current offensive is finished, "the Pakistanis will have to go on to try to root out other terrorist groups, or we're going to be back facing the same threats."