The Taliban have stepped up their campaign of violence since the military launched a major offensive in mid-October in the militant stronghold of South Waziristan in Pakistan’s lawless tribal area near the Afghan border. Friday’s attack was the second in two weeks against a mosque used by Pakistan’s security forces.

Most of the 10 people killed in the attack in the Lower Dir region were police leaving the mosque after Friday prayers, said the area’s police chief, Feroze Khan.

The blast wounded another 28 people, also mostly police, said a local hospital official, Ghulam Mohammed.

Lower Dir is next to the Swat Valley, which Pakistani soldiers wrested from the Taliban earlier this year. But periodic attacks have continued in the area.

Tuesday’s attack in Dera Ghazi Khan town in Punjab province is the latest in a series to hit Pakistan in recent months.

Islamist militants are blamed in the attacks.

Rescue official Natiq Hayat says the explosion left a large crater outside the house of Zulfikhar Khosa, the senior adviser to the chief minister of Punjab province.

No one in the house is believed to have been killed.

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The ascendancy of the Taliban and the relative decline of al-Qaeda have broad implications for the Obama administration as it seeks to define its enemy in Afghanistan and debates deploying tens of thousands of additional troops.

David Cohen, the department’s assistant secretary for terrorist financing, claimed the United States and its allies had successfully cut off funding to al-Qaida.

“We assess that al-Qaida is in its weakest financial condition in several years, and that, as a result, its influence is waning,” Cohen said yesterday at a conference sponsored by the American Bankers Association and the American Bar Association.

The claim echoed intelligence reports obtained by the Guardian last month that suggested the terrorist network was weakening and short of cash.

Taliban fighters in Afghanistan are being aided by “elements of some intelligence agencies,” Army Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal wrote in a detailed analysis of the military situation delivered to the White House earlier this month.

McChrystal went on to single out Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency as well as the Quds Force of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard as contributing to the external forces working to undermine U.S. interests and destabilize the government in Kabul.

Abdullah Laghmani and at least 21 other people were killed in the attack on a mosque in the town of Mehtar Lam.

A Taliban spokesman, Zabiullah Mujahid, told AP news agency a suicide bomber had targeted Mr Laghmani.

The 13-chapter guide, entitled Taliban 2009 Rules and Regulations, tells its militants to avoid unnecessary suicide bombings and civilian casualties.

The booklet issued by Taliban supreme leader Mullah Omar in May and several copies have been seized by Nato forces in raids in across Afghanistan this summer.

He died, his father explains, a soldier’s death, shot in the back after his Pakistani army unit marched into a trap in the Swat Valley. Recovering the body took four days because of the ferocity of Taliban sniper fire. It will take Sajad’s father far longer to understand why Pakistan is waging war with its own people.

Even if Pakistan succeeds in eliminating insurgents in one of its most intense operations yet, the northwestern valley is just one of several militant strongholds in the U.S.-allied country _ and not even the most important.

Already, fighting is flaring in the semiautonomous tribal areas bordering Afghanistan, where al-Qaida and the Taliban are more entrenched than they were in Swat.

The U.S. sees Swat as a test of nuclear-armed Pakistan’s ability and willingness to tackle insurgents in the northwest blamed for attacks on American and NATO forces in Afghanistan.