The bombing in Multan signaled a relentless determination on the part of the militants, who — despite being pressured by a major army offensive in one of their Afghan border havens — have sustained a retaliatory campaign since October that has killed more than 400 people. On Monday, bombings elsewhere in the country killed 59 people.

TV footage from Multan showed several severely damaged buildings in the neighborhood, some with their facades ripped off. Ambulances wailed as security forces flooded the zone, where a Federal Investigation Agency office was also located.

The apparent target of the blast was a building housing an office of Pakistan’s most powerful spy agency, Inter-Services Intelligence. Authorities still had not determined how the attack was carried out.

The army spokesman Major General Athar Abbas said he had “no information” about television reports that a siege situation was developing around the mosque, which was sealed off.

Witnesses reported a loud blast at the Parade Lane mosque, a five-minute drive from army headquarters, after militants stormed inside, followed by bursts of gunfire then more explosions.

Unconfirmed reports said there were at least four attackers. Some television stations said the death toll could be as high as 50.

But 200 miles north, in the crowded and chaotic city of Rawalpindi, the frustration of people waiting in long lines for emergency sugar rations often erupts into tirades against the government, the hoarders, the black marketeers and especially the wealthy families that dominate Pakistan’s lucrative sugar industry.

“Without sugar, my children will be crying when I get home. It is all because of strong people, the big owners and traders who have a lot of influence,” said Syed Inayat, 40, a trash collector who was waiting for his sugar ration outside a government store one recent morning.

The bomber hit at the main gate of the building, near the five-star Pearl Continental Hotel, where at least nine people were killed when attackers shot their way through a security checkpost and blew up a truck bomb in June.

Blood, flesh and shattered window glass littered the ground outside the court building, whose main gate was uprooted and where an old man who used to repair spectacles and fountain pens was killed, an AFP reporter said.

Thursday’s attack showed that militants can attack at will in the city of 2.5 million people, which lies on the edge of Pakistan’s lawless tribal belt, where US officials say Al-Qaeda militants are plotting attacks on the West.

Attacks in the northwest have soared as 30,000 Pakistani troops press into Taliban strongholds in the hostile terrain near the border with Afghanistan, where 100,000 NATO and US troops are fighting a deadly insurgency.

The fierce gunbattle, which erupted at dawn Saturday in the Kamdesh district of mountainous Nuristan province and raged throughout the day, is likely to fuel the debate in Washington over the direction of the troubled eight-year war.

It was the heaviest U.S. loss of life in a single battle since July 2008, when nine American soldiers were killed in a raid on an outpost in Wanat in the same province.

Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the top U.S. and NATO commander in Afghanistan, plans to shift U.S. troops away from remote outposts that are difficult to defend and move them into more heavily populated areas as part of his new strategy to focus on protecting Afghan civilians.

U.S. troops used artillery, helicopter gunships and airstrikes Saturday to repel the attackers, inflicting “heavy enemy casualties,” according to a NATO statement. Fighting persisted

She was raped and nearly stabbed to death by her husband just seven days before we met her.

Her lips are quivering and her eyes full of fear.

“He forced himself on me,” she said. “All I could do was scream.”

She was married off 15 years ago when she was a teenager.

Throughout those years she was tortured and abused, suffering daily beatings with an electrical wire or the metal end of a hammer.

This was her normal life.

“He chased after me with a hammer. He said if I made any noise he would put holes through me,”

At least three suicide bombers blew themselves up during the onslaught, which began in the early afternoon near a US military base. General Mohammad Zahir Azimi, a defence ministry spokesman, said later that Afghan forces had surrounded the attackers.

The raid came as the United States asked Pakistan for help in ensuring a peaceful election campaign. Islamabad has been asked to send troops to key points along its border with Helmand to stop Taliban militia crossing back and forth.

“More than 100 Taliban are here right now in Malakpur village,” says one resident, who says that everyone stays hidden in their homes. “There is so much fear that we cannot speak to neighbors – even husbands cannot say something to wives.”

The militants set up barricades and are checking identification cards to locate their enemies – officials, party workers, and tribal leaders. For this reason he refused to share his name over the phone, nor can his story be independently confirmed.

The proposed offensive does indeed appear to be a victory for President Obama’s new AfPak strategy, which tries to take a more cohesive approach to the region. If the assault, as expected, coincides with a surge of US troops in southern Afghanistan, the militants will soon be under fire from all sides and robbed of the safe havens they have enjoyed since late 2001.

A meeting between the leaders of India and Pakistan in Russia today could also pave the way for India to reduce troop levels in Kashmir, allowing Pakistan to deploy more soldiers against the Taleban.

Anyone who has observed Pakistan since 2001 has to be acutely aware of the army’s technical limitations, of South Waziristan’s deeply inhospitable terrain and of the militants’ resilience. They will also be mindful that Pakistan has long drawn a distinction between good and bad militants, helping the US to kill or capture foreigners, while shielding locals it considers to be potential future assets

Fresh fighting also broke out between security forces and Taliban insurgents in one of the tribal areas bordering Afghanistan and a U.S. missile strike was launched in another.

The latest bombing came Sunday in Dera Ismail Khan, a town near the tribal areas, where explosives planted in a fruit vendor’s cart killed at least eight people, police official Mohammad Iqbal said.