Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda appears to be using established militant groups and small cells for bloody attacks in Pakistan aimed at destabilising President Pervez Musharraf and thus the wider war on terror, analysts say.
In the past month, Pakistan has been rocked by a fresh wave of bombings of majority Sunni and minority Shia gatherings that have killed nearly 80 people.
It has also seen its ties with its closest ally China tested by the kidnapping of two Chinese engineers in a tribal region bordering Afghanistan in which one of the foreign hostages died.
Diplomats and other analysts believe al-Qaeda cells are using Pakistan as a key battleground in its broader war against the United States and are exploiting long-standing enmity between Sunni and Shia extremists to further this aim.
They say the government's failure to crack down on groups it has used for years as tools of policy in the Indian occupied Kashmir region and in Afghanistan has played into al-Qaeda's hands.
"In the past, for example, there was no trend of suicide attacks and such kind of sophisticated bombings in Pakistan," he said. "This shows al-Qaeda's involvement.
The government and some analysts argue that the recent spike in attacks is a result of government pressure on militants, including the killing last month of Amjad Farooqi, whom it described as a key link between local militants and al-Qaeda.
"Their important people are being killed or arrested," Information Minister Sheikh Rashid Ahmed told Reuters. "They are panicky. They are hitting back in desperation."
Analysts agreed with the minister's view that mainly Sunni al-Qaeda was masterminding attacks in Pakistan, but doubted it was striking back in desperation.
"There's no doubt that they have been hit hard," an Islamabad-based diplomat said of al-Qaeda.
"But I don't buy the line that because they have so much success, this is just the last fling of a few desperate people.
"What the recent violence suggests is that there is a big enough pool of people out there and they are well enough trained and they are well enough equipped."
Security officials say militants from outlawed Sunni sectarian groups like Sipah-e-Sahaba Pakistan and its splinter group Lashkar-e-Jhangvi were the closest allies of al-Qaeda.
But they say many members of other mainstream religious parties, fired by religious passion since the United States ousted the Taleban in Afghanistan, then invaded Iraq, have also joined al-Qaeda-linked cells to carry out terror assaults.
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