NEW YORK, July 14: American law enforcement agencies have been working in tandem with the American military in Pakistan in an unusual and sustained manner to hunt down Al Qaeda fighters who are trying to regroup in Pakistan, said the New York Times on Sunday.

In a lead article, the Times said that in Pakistani cities, the FBI agents were helping the local police and providing information —in rare instances even personnel — to break up what senior American intelligence and law enforcement officials regarded a depleted but still dangerous network. In recent weeks, they said, that network had carried out deadly attacks against Westerners in Karachi and Islamabad.

In the barren terrain along the Afghan border, elite American soldiers were using intelligence sent from American reconnaissance units in Afghanistan and high-tech surveillance overhead to track Al Qaeda fighters crossing into Pakistan, the paper said.

It underscored: “Never before have the traditionally independent military and law enforcement organizations worked so much in concert, sharing information and expertise as Al Qaeda tries to reconstitute itself in Pakistan. The cooperation goes far beyond joint efforts in the past to fight the flow of drugs”.

In fact, the paper asserted, “Pakistan has become a laboratory for how American power could be used to combat terror. Similar, if smaller, American operations appear to be unfolding in the Philippines and Yemen, where the FBI continues its investigation of the attack in October 2000 on the Navy destroyer Cole”.

The paper said that Al Qaeda’s movement presented American leaders with new problems, as these terrorists reached out to like-minded Pakistani militants and made extensive use of the Internet and cellphones in densely populated urban areas.

A glimpse into the future came last month, when a Pakistani group, apparently financed by Al Qaeda, carried out a deadly attack just outside the American Consulate in Karachi.

“If you don’t do anything, you risk simply allowing Al Qaeda to replicate the platform they had in Afghanistan,” a senior American government official told the paper.

American agents in Pakistan and elsewhere were treading softly, for fear of infuriating local populations and undercutting shaky governments like that of Gen Pervez Musharraf, the paper said.