The classified orders signal a watershed for the Bush administration after nearly seven years of trying to work with Pakistan to combat the Taliban and al Qaeda elements, New York Times reported on Thursday quoting senior American officials.

“The situation in the tribal areas is not tolerable,” a senior official told the paper.

“We have to be more assertive. Orders have been issued.” The new orders, the paper said, reflect concern about safe havens for Al Qaeda and the Taliban inside Pakistan, as well as an American view that Pakistan lacks the will and ability to combat militants.

They also illustrate lingering distrust of the Pakistani military and intelligence agencies and a belief that some American operations had been compromised once Pakistanis were advised of the details, the official said.

American officials were quoting as saying that they will notify Pakistan when they conduct limited ground attacks like the Special Operations raid last Wednesday in a Pakistani village near the Afghanistan border, but that they will not ask for its permission.

The newspaper reported that US officials have been debating for months whether to authorise such attacks against al-Qaeda and Taliban following US intelligence warning that these militants were consolidating in North-Western Pakistan.

The reports comes after US led Coalition forces have launched cross-border raid inside Pakistan which left 15 people dead including some top al-Qaeda functionaries.

Besides, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has for several years fired missiles at militants inside Pakistan from remotely piloted Predator aircraft, the paper noted.

But the new orders for the military’s Special Operations forces relax firm restrictions on conducting raids on the soil of “an important ally” without its permission.

A top Pakistani army general has said that his forces would not tolerate American incursions like the one that took place last week and that the army would defend the country’s sovereignty “at all costs.”

It is unclear, the report said, precisely what legal authority, the United States has invoked to conduct even limited ground raids in a friendly country.

A second senior American official told the Times that the Pakistani government had privately assented to the general concept of limited ground assaults by Special Operations forces against significant militant targets.

The official did not say which members of the Pakistani government gave their approval, the paper said. Any new ground operations in Pakistan, the report said, raise the prospect of American forces being killed or captured in the restive tribal areas and a propaganda coup for al-Qaeda.

PAK-BUSH 3LST Last week’s raid also presents a major test for Pakistan’s new president, Asif Ali Zardari, who supports more aggressive action by his army against the militants but cannot risk being viewed as an American lap dog, as was his predecessor, Pervez Musharraf, the paper said.

The new orders, the Times added, were issued after months of debate inside the Bush administration about whether to authorise a ground campaign inside Pakistan. The debate, first reported by The New York Times in late June.

The paper said that details about last week’s commando operation have emerged that indicate the mission was more intrusive than had previously been known.

It quoted two American officials briefed on the raid as saying it involved more than two dozen members of the Navy Seals who spent several hours on the ground and killed about two dozen suspected Qaeda fighters in what now appeared to have been a planned attack against militants who had been conducting attacks against an American forward operating base across the border in Afghanistan.

Supported by an AC-130 gunship, the Special Operations forces were whisked away by helicopters after completing the mission.

Pakistan’s government has asserted that last week’s raid achieved little except killing civilians and stoking anti-Americanism in the tribal areas.

“Unilateral action by the American forces does not help the war against terror because it only enrages public opinion,” said Husain Haqqani, Pakistan’s ambassador to Washington, during a speech on Friday.

“In this particular incident, nothing was gained by the action of the troops.”

The stepped-up campaign inside Pakistan, the Times says, comes at a time when American-Pakistani relations have been fraying. There is resentment within American intelligence agencies about ties between ISI, and militants in the tribal areas.