Taliban militants gather around two Afghan men prior to their execution in Damadola near Khar area of Bajaur agency in Pakistan, yesterday. Militants beheaded one man and shot the other after telling the crowd that the pair had passed information to US forces in Afghanistan that led to a deadly missile strike in May. (AFP)

PESHAWAR, Pakistan • The Taliban are no longer at the gates of Peshawar, they're inside, throwing their weight around in Pakistan's largest city in the north-west.

Their brazen presence is a chilling demonstration of the political and military failure to resist a militant Islamist tide rolling in from the Pashtun tribal belt on the Afghan border.

"This speaks of a complete lack of control by the government over the situation," said Mehmood Shah, a former tribal region security chief. "That's why people are feeling insecure."

President Pervez Musharraf, the West's ally in the war on terrorism, warned more than two years ago that Talibanisation, the spread of the militants' puritanical culture, was the greatest threat Pakistan faced.

But his policies of containment have failed against an enemy that fights an asymmetric war, and the new government formed last March after the electoral defeat of pro-Musharraf parties, has inherited a rapidly deteriorating situation. "We have virtually been besieged by these militants," a worried security official said. "If they are not stopped, they will take over Peshawar."

Bomb attacks were more frequent in Peshawar than any other city, although the militants spread their targets to the rest of Pakistan during a suicide bomb campaign last year.

The attacks tailed off in recent months, probably due to the new government's policy of seeking peace deals.

Earlier this week, Taliban fighters killed close to 30 tribesmen who had been part of the peace process in South Waziristan, the most remote of the seven semi-autonomous regions in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA).

These days Taliban fighters don't sneak in to Peshawar, home to the main military garrison in the north-west.

They arrive in broad daylight on the back of pick-up trucks, brandishing automatic weapons, and threatening owners of music stores to close down.

"They had long hair and flowing beards, and were carrying Kalashnikovs. They told me to close down the shop or face the consequences," Abdul Latif, a clean-shaven 20-year-old, whose video store received a visit from the vigilantes last week. "I asked police for help but they said they are helpless," he said, standing in front of racks full of Indian movies.

Last weekend, two pick-up vans drove in from the nearby Khyber tribal region, and carried off 25 Christians. They were released 12 hours later, but the Christian community understood the message. Even a hardline Muslim cleric known for his past support for the Taliban and opposition to Pakistan's alliance with the United States, has rung alarm bells.

"It's just a matter of months before news comes that the entire North West Frontier Province has slipped out of control," Fazl-ur-Rehman, head of Jamiat-e-ulema-e-Islam and member of the ruling coalition, warned parliament. The fiercely independent Pashtun tribes have readily answered calls for jihad, and Peshawar was headquarters for mujahideen fighting the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s. Home to three million people, the city is just two hours from the capital, Islamabad, where radicals from the Red Mosque also began by intimidating owners of music and video stores, before a commando assault on the mosque crushed their movement last July.

Officials said they were getting ready to go on the offensive within weeks to free Peshawar from the creeping insurgency, and an anti-terrorist force of 7,000 men had been raised.