Barack Obama, Pakistan

OBAMA FOR USA. Pakistan has become a major focus of Mr. Obama's national security team, as the Taliban insurgency has spread through the country's western regions.

In February, officials said that Mr. Obama had decided to step up the Predator missile strikes against militant camps within Pakistan, despite protests from its government. In March, President Obama offered Pakistan a partnership and a promise of $1.5 billion in aid for each of the next five years to help defeat the Taliban. And he appointed Mr. Holbrooke as a special envoy to the region in an effort to stop the Taliban from continuing to destabilize, and threatening to devour, the country.

Mr. Obama's approach, however, faces serious uncertainty, because of the weakness of the Pakistani government and doubts about the commitment of the Pakistani military to fighting the insurgency. The Taliban has steadily increased its power and the areas it controls, in both the Swat Valley, where it imposed shariah law with the government's consent, and in the Buner District, a strategically important section just 70 miles from the capital of Islamabad. The fall of Buner to the Taliban in late April has raised new international alarm about the ability of the Pakistani government to fend off the unrelenting Taliban advance.

Officially, Pakistan's government welcomed Mr. Obama's strategy, hailing it as a "positive change." But as the Obama administration tries to bring Pakistanis to its side, large parts of the Pakistani public, the political class and the military have brushed off the plan, rebuffing the idea that the threat from Al Qaedaand the Taliban, which Washington calls a common enemy, is so urgent. Many Pakistanis have concluded that reaching an accommodation with the militants is preferable to fighting them.

Under pressure from the Obama administration, and as Pakistan's president, Asif Ali Zardari, met with President Obama at the White House, Pakistan said its forces were trying to turn back an encroachment by Taliban militants that has brought the insurgents to within 60 miles of Islamabad.