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“Congress has protected Awlaki’s cellphone calls,” said Vicki Divoll, a former C.I.A. lawyer who now teaches at the United States Naval Academy. “But it has not provided any protections for his life. That makes no sense.”

PESHAWAR, Pakistan — An airstrike by Pakistan’s military killed as many as 75 civilians in northwestern Pakistan over the weekend, according to a government official and villagers from the area. A military official confirmed some civilian deaths, but said the toll had been far lower.

The extrajudicial execution of up to 300 alleged Taliban supporters and sympathizers in the area around Mingora, the Swat capital, has been documented by New York-based Human Rights Watch, which conducted interviews with more than 100 Swat families in February and March. A report on the alleged abuses, including torture, home demolitions and illegal detentions and disappearances, is scheduled for release this month.

"This attack shows that the Taliban are getting good cooperation from the locals and that they have better intelligence than the Americans do," said Talat Masood, a Pakistani security analyst and retired general in Islamabad, Pakistan's capital. "It also raises the issue that has haunted the Afghan National Army from the beginning -- whether or not it is possible to build a unified army that can overcome ethnic loyalties in support of broader American goals."

The spread of fighters is an unintended consequence of a relatively successful effort by the United States and Pakistan to disrupt the insurgents' operations, through missile strikes launched by unmanned CIA aircraft and a ground offensive carried out this fall in South Waziristan by the Pakistani army.

This is not such an unusual view in Pakistan, even if the tone was particularly harsh. At 62 years old, Pakistan is something of a teenager among nations, even in its frame of mind — self-conscious, emotional, quick to blame others for its troubles.

A poll by Gallup Pakistan last summer found only 9 percent of Pakistanis in favor of the attacks and 67 percent against, with a majority ranking the United States as a greater threat to Pakistan than its archrival, India, or the Pakistani Taliban.

In recent months, in addition to providing White House officials with classified assessments about Afghanistan, the C.I.A. delivered a plan for widening the campaign of strikes against militants by drone aircraft in Pakistan, sending additional spies there and securing a White House commitment to bulk up the C.I.A.’s budget for operations inside the country.

Among refugees who were jostling for donated blankets last week in this dusty town in North-West Frontier Province, few dared to discuss the Taliban fighters controlling their villages. Several whispered that there was no graver offense than speaking against the Taliban and seemed fearful that breaching that rule would cost them once the offensive -- which several referred to as an artificial "drama" cooked up to satisfy the United States -- was over.

On Saturday, the Pakistani military deployed 30,000 troops into South Waziristan as part of a broad offensive against the Taliban and other militant groups. U.S. and European officials have said they hope the mission will force many of the training camps to shut down.

But analysts said the camps, which offer basic lessons in homemade explosives and countersurveillance as well as weapons training, could easily relocate elsewhere in Pakistan or even back across the border in Afghanistan, where they operated before the U.S. invasion in 2001.