NEW YORK, Aug 9: Blowing hot and cold, the US media these days is awash in superlatives for Pakistan's help in tracking down Al-Qaeda operatives who allegedly were seeking to disrupt US elections.

Pakistan is proving to be crucial and vital to the US-led war on terrorism and its also a vindication of US President Bush's decision to make the country its number one ally, security experts said on Monday.

With criticism growing here that the US was not getting much for its billion-dollar partnership with Islamabad, the security operations - carried out with CIA- supplied surveillance equipment and other sophisticated American backing - have put the shine back on US- Pakistani relations, said a newspaper.

The recently concluded 9/11 commission in America took special note of this, singling out Pakistan - along with Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia - as a country requiring special attention from the US.

In just one example of the challenge, the commission said that in Karachi alone more than 200,000 children are being educated in the city's 859 madressahs - religious schools that are often a poor child's only opportunity for education, but which in some cases have been "incubators for violent extremism."

The arrests, which delivered the very specific intelligence that ultimately led to a heightened terror alert in the US and provided new information on plans for attacks in Europe, exemplify the crucial role of broad international cooperation in the war on terror.

The events also vindicate President Bush's decision after the 9/11 terrorist attacks to embrace President Pervez Musharraf as a way to press Pakistan - which had maintained good ties with Afghanistan's Taliban rulers - into fighting Islamist terrorism noted the CS Monitor in a lead article.

"I haven't seen any signs of any weakening of US-Pakistani relations even though people are grumbling," Robert Oakley, a former US ambassador to Pakistan told CS Monitor. "But at the same time [the Pakistanis] should be encouraged to do more. There's been some over-all progress," he says, "but in terms of movement towards an over-all moderation, I don't think they've done enough."

However, with Pakistan's raids against Al-Qaeda nabbing terror suspects with troves of information about apparent links to cell members in the US, no one anticipates an expression of official US impatience with Pakistan any time soon.

The former US Ambassador cautioned US efforts to prod Pakistan along the road of political and social reform must continue, but will have to be done privately. "There's no point in being more forceful about it in public," he says. "The US is already very unpopular there, and Musharraf is already seen as a US puppet."

But the CS Monitor also noted that the situation is a complex one - with Mr. Musharraf facing assassination threats at home even as the US is looking to him for progress in difficult problems ranging from Al-Qaeda and weapons proliferation to the Kashmir dispute.

Even experts who recognize the challenges he faces say that especially in the area of political reforms, Musharraf could do more. And the US, they say, will have to do more to encourage economic growth in Pakistan and can't look away as the Musharraf government pays mostly lip service to the need for democratic reforms.