Along the Afghan border, not far from this northwestern city, Islamic militants have used a firm foothold over the past year to train and dispatch suicide bombers against American and NATO forces in Afghanistan. But in recent weeks the suicide bombers have turned on Pakistan itself, carrying out six attacks and killing 35 people. Militant leaders have threatened to unleash scores more, in effect opening a new front in their war.

In Peshawar and other parts of North-West Frontier Province, which abuts the tribal areas, residents say English-language schools have received threats, schoolgirls have been warned to veil themselves, music is being banned and men are told not to shave their beards.

Then there is the mounting toll of the suicide bombings. One of the most lethal killed 15 people in Peshawar, most of them police officers, including the popular police chief.

In Tank, a town close to the lawless tribal area of South Waziristan, where militants have their own Taliban mini-state, the police have taken off their uniforms, essentially ceding control to the militants, who now use the town as a logistics supply base, according to one Western diplomat in Pakistan.

The attacks all stem from the tribal area of Waziristan, according to a senior government official, who asked not to be identified because investigations are continuing. There, he said, groups supporting jihad in Kashmir and Afghanistan, sectarian groups and militant splinter cells have morphed into a kind of hydra.

“They are all there in South Waziristan’s Wana region,” the official said. “It’s no longer an Afghan-only problem. It has become as much a Pakistan problem too.”

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