As part of the government's ramping up of its fight against the insurgents, it will offer bounties of up to $600,000 for each of the top three Taliban leaders, according to an official advertisement to be published today in Pakistani newspapers.

But the recent successes of the campaign in South Waziristan - and the optimism of Foreign Minister Makhdoom Shah Mahmood Qureshi that it would soon achieve its objectives - were offset by a string of antigovernment attacks in other tribal regions, where insurgents kidnapped and killed a prominent government supporter and blew up a girls' school.

The kidnapping occurred Saturday night in the town of Khar, the largest in the Bajur tribal region, when a group of about 60 stormed the house of Jahangir Khan, said Adalat Khan, a town official.

"The bullet-riddled body of Jahangir Khan was found a kilometer away from the main town, with his legs and hands tied with a rope," the official said. Khan had apparently been dragged before being shot, he said.

The same insurgents also kidnapped one of the town's wealthiest landlords, his son, his grandson, and another relative. It was not immediately clear why they were kidnapped, though abductions for ransom have become increasingly common.

Pakistan launched a major offensive in Bajur last year and now insists it has total control nearly everywhere in the region, including in Khar - a claim undercut by the Saturday attacks and a series of other violent incidents in recent months.

Insurgents also blew up a girls' school in the Khyber tribal region, the latest in the Taliban's campaign against modern education, which has destroyed hundreds of schools across Pakistan, said local official Ghulam Farooq Khan. The school's guard and three of his relatives were injured in yesterday's attack in the town of Bara, near where seven Pakistani paramilitary soldiers were killed in a Saturday roadside bombing.

Despite such problems, Qureshi insisted things were going well in the government's two-week-old offensive in South Waziristan, one of the semiautonomous tribal regions where the Taliban has grown in power in recent years.

"The operation so far has been very successful," he said.

The fighting yesterday, meanwhile, took place in Kaniguram, a Taliban stronghold where government forces are still fighting for control of about half the village. Nine insurgents had been killed in South Waziristan in the last 24 hours, according to an army statement.

While Pakistan aided in the rise of the Afghan Taliban in the 1990s, the growth of an extremist Taliban network on its own soil has increasingly destabilized the country. Today, the government plans to advertise bounties for the group's leaders.

The highest bounties will be offered for help in the capture - dead or alive - of Hakimullah Mehsud, the chief of the Pakistani Taliban; Waliur Rehman, the South Waziristan commander; and Qari Hussain Mehsud, believed to be the main trainer of suicide bombers. Lesser bounties were offered for 16 other Taliban officials.