GHAR-I-HIRA CAMP, Pakistan – Deep in the tunnel, a small wooden cabinet is the only piece of furniture, a syringe still in its plastic wrapper and a disposable razor scattered on the shelves. A pair of sky-blue pants lies on the rocky ground by the remnants of a threadbare sleeping mat.
"This was their safest haven," said Waseem Shafique, a Pakistani army major whose men stumbled onto this hand-hewn cave and the militant camp around it this month. "Nothing can touch them in here, it is safe from shelling, they cannot be seen — everything."
The hillside camp offers rare insight into conditions, tools and tactics being used by insurgents against government troops in the picturesque, northwestern Swat Valley for about the past two years.
It may also be a foreboding sign of the much tougher fight to come as the military moves into the grotto- and tunnel-ridden tribal region on the Afghan border, the scene of the next anti-Taliban operation and where battle-hardened militants have had much longer to dig in.
In another worrying sign, commanders and experts warn that some of the most formidable Taliban leaders and fighters who have escaped from Swat may be heading for the tribal zone of South Waziristan.
The Obama administration is an enthusiastic supporter of Pakistan's apparent determination to confront the militants this time, after years of striking peace deals that have collapsed and launching offensives that have failed to complete the job.
Less than three months after the Taliban advanced from Swat to a neighboring area just 60 miles from the capital, Islamabad, the army now says it has the militants on the run, helped by tips from residents fed up with their brutality.
The military took a small media group on Saturday to view the Ghar-i-Hira camp, a facility spread over three tiers cut into a pine-forested hillside in the upper reaches of the Swat Valley.
A simple tunnel system formed the militants' living quarters — a 120-foot-deep corridor chipped into the rock hillside, with two antechambers branching off in a rough T-shape. Shreds of clothes lay scattered on the ground along with the scraps of sleeping mats. The battered cabinet leaned precariously, charred by a kerosene fire set in the tunnel by troops.
Outside, soldiers displayed items found in the tunnel and a smaller cave they said was an ammunition store: a machine gun and ammo belts, a pistol, mortar rounds, and an empty box of rocket-propelled grenades stamped "government explosive" in English. The government was not identified, and soldiers said they could not identify the box as Pakistani or otherwise.
There were bags of gunpowder, two small pipe bombs, a half-dozen alarm clocks and television remote controls — the makings of improvised explosive devices that are often used to attack security forces convoys in Pakistan's northwest. Also on hand was a book in Urdu the soldiers said was about the glory of jihad, or holy struggle.
In the kitchen area nearby, a pot of sweetened rice sat rotting — evidence of the soldiers' account that the camp was discovered on June 11 as the militants were preparing breakfast. The militants spotted a patrol on a nearby ridge and dropped what they were doing to open fire.
In the 13-hour gunbattle that followed, seven soldiers and about 40 militants were killed and about the same number escaped along narrow paths through the pine forest, Shafique said.
Elsewhere in the camp was a makeshift mosque, a hole-ridden metal plate hanging from a tree used for target practice, and an area strewn with coils of barbed wire and wooden structures soldiers said were used for training.
Access to the region has been strictly controlled, and no independent confirmation of the military's account of the battle was available.
Maj. Gen. Sajjad Ghani, the Swat offensive's northern commander, said foreigners were among the roughly 100 fighters at the camp, and that some were killed.
Officials showed journalists a grainy photograph of several corpses, but their ethnicity was not discernible. Ghani said it was easy to spot foreigners by their different appearance from Pakistanis, and named Afghans, Chechens, Uzbeks and Tajiks as among those believed to be in the camp.
"The hard-core, there is only one thing. You have to kill them," he said. "They are like a mad dog, and what can you do with a mad dog? You must kill it."
A surfer catches a wave off of Kewalo Basin in Hawaii. AP Photo/Marco Garcia
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