Lynsey Addario for The New York Times
Pakistani women lined up for identity cards at a camp in Jalala last week after fleeing fighting between the army and the Taliban.
So far, much of the action against the militants has been carried out from the air. The assault by commandos on the town of Piochar, in northern Swat, was one of the first efforts by Pakistani soldiers to join the fight in large numbers.
Piochar is a base for Maulana Fazlullah, one of the principal Taliban warlords who are challenging the government’s authority.
More than 700 militants have been killed since the operation began last week, General Abbas said. “The militants are on the run,” he said.
The general’s claims are impossible to verify because reporters and other independent observers have been excluded from the area. There was no indication, for instance, that the fight to wrest the district capital, Mingora, from Taliban fighters had begun. Pakistanis reached earlier this week said the militants had retained all the territory they held in Swat when the operation began.
The exodus, if it proves to be as large as the government says, would be one of the largest migrations of civilians in the region since the partition of India and Pakistan in 1947, when as many as 14 million people left their homes for one of the newly independent countries.
The Pakistani government and relief agencies have set up a string of camps and food distribution centers in the area, but not nearly enough to accommodate all the people who need them. On Monday, Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani appealed to foreign countries to help Pakistan deal with the human tide. On Tuesday, the United Nations said it was sending 120 tons of emergency supplies to Pakistan to help with the flow of refugees.
For all the turmoil unfolding here, a mood of confidence has settled on Islamabad, the capital, since the operation began last week, not necessarily over the chances of its success, but for what appears to be a change of heart in the Pakistani Army. The army, historically the most influential institution in the country, has for years acquiesced in the advance of the Taliban insurgency, which has taken control not just of the Swat Valley, but also of the vast region known as the Federally Administered Tribal Areas.
The most shocking surrender occurred in February, when the military, and then the country’s civilian leaders, ratified the takeover of Swat by Taliban militants. Under the terms of the peace deal, the government agreed to allow the Taliban to establish Islamic law in the region. But the Taliban fighters, most of them under the leadership of Mr. Fazlullah, continued usurping and attacking the government anyway.
Then, last month, the Taliban took over Buner, an adjoining district only 60 miles from Islamabad. The conquest shook the central government, as well as the middle and upper classes across the country. It also caused American officials to apply enormous pressure on Pakistan to act.
The ensuing campaign, begun last week, appears to have been prosecuted with a new resolve. Whether that will translate into effective action is unclear, but Pakistan’s leaders have been speaking with a new sense of purpose. In a brief meeting with reporters outside his parliamentary office, Rehman Malik, the interior minister, said the government was prevailing against the militants.
“The way they are being beaten, the way their recruits are fleeing, and the way the Pakistan Army is using its strategy, God willing, the operation will be completed very soon,” Mr. Malik said.
As the fighting in Swat unfolded this week, missiles fired by a remotely piloted American drone killed 15 people, suspected of being militants, in a village in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas on Tuesday morning. The missiles, apparently three in all, hit a suspected safe house operated by local militants in Sra Khawra, a village that sits on the border between the tribal agencies of North and South Waziristan.
The strike was confirmed by a Pakistani security official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak with reporters. The drone attacks, carried out with the tacit cooperation of the Pakistani government, have become extremely controversial here. Neither the Americans nor the Pakistanis publicly acknowledge that they even take place.
One reporter working in the area said the militants who were the targets of the strike had returned from fighting along the Pakistani and Afghan border and were in the village when it was attacked by a drone.