Militants launched a string of attacks on police in the Pakistani heartland and in the troubled northwest today, killing at least 39 people after a week of violence in which more than 100 people died.
The attacks in Lahore, capital of Punjab province, and a car bomb in Kohat in the northwest, come ahead of an expected military offensive against the Taliban in their South Waziristan stronghold on the Afghan border.
The violence, just days after a daring raid on the army headquarters in Rawalpindi, underscored the risk posed by militants to Punjab, Pakistan's most economically important province and the country's traditional seat of power.
The dramatic escalation in violence appears to be an attempt by the Taliban- and al-Qaeda-led insurgency to seize the initiative from the army and deliver a warning to the US-backed civilian government.
President Asif Ali Zardari said the bloodshed that has engulfed the nation over the past two weeks would not deter the government from its mission to eliminate the violent extremists.
"The enemy has started a guerrilla war," Interior Minister Rehman Malik said. "The whole nation should be united against these handful of terrorists, and God willing we will defeat them."
"First the (North West) Frontier province was on the front line, now they are playing their games in Punjab," interior minister Rehman Malik told Geo television.
The government says most attacks in the country are plotted in South Waziristan and carried out by Taliban, often with the help of allies from militant groups based in Punjab province.
Nuclear-armed Pakistan is under US pressure to crack down on Islamic militancy as president Barack Obama considers a boost in troop numbers fighting in neighbouring Afghanistan.
Ten gunmen, some of them teenagers, were killed in the attacks on three police centres in Lahore.
Seven people, including one gunman, were killed at a regional headquarters of the police's Federal Investigation Agency. One gunman escaped and one was captured, security officials said.
A suicide car-bomber attacked the same building in March last year killing 21 people.
Gunmen also attacked two police training centres, one a training school attacked this year and the other an elite police academy set in fields in the city outskirts.
Eleven police, six of them recruits, and four gunmen were killed at the Manawa training centre, police said. Three of the black-clad attackers blew themselves up.
A policeman, a civilian and five gunmen were killed at the academy and media had reported hostages taken. Three gunmen blew themselves up and two, including one who was about 16, were shot by snipers, police said.
Several hours after the attacks began, police said all three centres had been cleared and no hostages had been taken.
The attacks in Lahore spread fear and sirens from police and other emergency vehicles wailed over the city as hundreds of police and soldiers sealed off the three sites.
Shortly before the attacks in Lahore, a suicide car bomber set off his explosives outside a police station in Kohat killing 10 people, police and military officials said.
The government says a ground offensive against an estimated 10,000 hard core Taliban is imminent in South Waziristan.
The Taliban said it carried out the brazen assault on the army's headquarters in Rawalpindi and some other attacks and vowed more in revenge for the killing of their leader, Baitullah Mehsud, in a US missile strike in August.
The government in June ordered the army to launch an offensive in South Waziristan. Since then the military has been conducting air and artillery strikes to soften up militant defences.
Aircraft flew several bombing sorties to attack the Makeen militant base in South Waziristan on Thursday, security officials said. There was no word on casualties.
The government says the assault is imminent but it will be up to the army to decide when to send in ground troops.
"Such barbaric, inhuman and un-Islamic terrorist acts only strengthen our resolve to fight terrorism with more vitality," foreign minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi said in a statement.
Separately, a US drone aircraft fired two missiles at a house in the North Waziristan region, killing four Afghan Taliban militants linked to a faction led by veteran militant commander Jalaluddin Haqqani, Pakistani officials said.
The United States, struggling with an intensifying insurgency in Afghanistan and frustrated with Pakistan's failure to eliminate Taliban sanctuaries on its side of the border, stepped up attacks by its drones in September last year.
Hundreds of people, most of them militants but including some civilians, have been killed.
Reuters