The full text of the exchange with a reporter follows:

Q Can I change the subject to Pakistan? Does the President have full confidence in Musharraf, particularly given the violence there from the Islamic —

MR. SNOW: Well, I think — look, President Musharraf has put his life on the line and has been a very important ally in the war on terror. It’s also clear that Taliban and al Qaeda, in the northwest territories and the federally administered tribal areas, have begun to put on operations that threaten the government of Pakistan itself, which is why President Musharraf, having tried one approach, in terms of dealing with the tribal leaders, is now going to have to be more aggressive and is being more aggressive moving forces into the region to deal with the security problems there.

Q Does the President rule out any U.S. military activity in Pakistan?

MR. SNOW: We never rule out any options, including striking actionable targets.

When asked, “Would the President seek Musharraf’s permission to strike an actionable [target]?” Snow refused to say one way or the other. “Those are matters that are best not discussed publicly,” he said.

This represents an increase in the U.S. pressure on Musharraf–which was already considerable–and effectively puts him on notice directly from the White House: If Musharraf can’t handle the Al Qaeda problem, the United States will.

A nascent and evolving theory is that the administration is signaling now, to Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf and the world, that the United States is more prepared than it has been in years to send American forces into Pakistan’s lawless tribal areas to do what Musharraf either cannot or will not–rout the resurgent Al Qaeda.

Consider some of the key plot points that have led to the current moment in the Pakistan narrative. In February, Defense Secretary Robert Gates made a surprise visit to Pakistan, ostensibly to ease the “war of words” between that country and Afghanistan over what to do with the troubled tribal areas. But Gates was also there to deliver a message to Musharraf–you need to do more to fix this problem.

About two weeks later, Vice President Dick Cheney flew to Islamabad to meet with Musharraf, taking with him the CIA’s deputy director, Stephen Kappes, an seasoned spy and longtime Asia hand who had served in Pakistan. This was not a cordial call. Musharraf’s intelligence services were, and still are, in shambles. Officials don’t know who is loyal to Musharraf and who is loyal to jihadits in Pakistan, and this limits their effectiveness. Musharraf clearly lacks the human intelligence to get close to Al Qaeda without seeing his own troops slaughtered. So, one has to conclude that Kappes was there to provide the Pakistani president with more than moral support. The CIA is giving him intelligence, likely helping him understand who in his own country is trying to kill him, and to help Musharraf deal with the tribal areas. (Apparently this strategy hasn’t been terribly effective, if the intelligence community’s own judgment is that Al Qaeda is strong again.)

At the same time Cheney and Kappes were meeting with Musharraf, senior intelligence officials were briefing reporters on the growing threat of Al Qaeda in Pakistan, telling them that the organization had replenished its middle ranks. Intelligence indicated that the foiled British planes bombing plot the previous year had an operational link to the resurgent group, they said.

Fast forward to this month. The New York Times reported that, in 2005, the Pentagon called off a clandestine U.S. strike in the tribal areas aimed at capturing Al Qaeda officials. Then Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld worried that the strike–which apparently had ballooned into a full-fledged invasion when military planners demanded security cover–would jeopardize U.S.-Pakistan relations. But in leaking this story two years later, the message to Musharraf from the Pentagon and the intelligence community was clear: We hesitated then, we won’t now.

That brings us to this week’s NIE, which put the official stamp on what we’ve known for months. A few days before its release, the intelligence community’s top analyst publicly briefed members of Congress on the substance of the Pakistan problem.

Taken together, this build-up in U.S. anxiety–first expressed in surprise visits by top officials, now playing out in congressional testimony and public intelligence documents–signals that the Bush administration is dispensing with its light-touch strategy. It was that approach that kept thousands of combat troops from descending into the tribal areas in 2005. This has been replaced by tough public rhetoric and an undercurrent of hostility.

One has to wonder if the administration thinks the time for words has past. Is the United States moving towards its own military solution to Al Qaeda in Pakistan? The administration has stayed off that course for fear it would so badly destabilize Musharraf that he would lose his grip on power, with disastrous consequences for American interests. Well, the country appears to be sliding into instability, so perhaps one objection has gone away. But if Al Qaeda really has re-charged its batteries, and is more capable of striking out from Pakistan today than it has been in years–which is now the official line–then the administration might think it has no choice but to strike, if Musharraf won’t.

It sounds implausible given the administration’s cautious strategy to date. But consider what would happen if an Al Qaeda cell linked to Pakistan mounts a devastating attack in the United States. The United States would respond with full force, a la Afghanistan in 2002. Is the administration prepared to wait for that moment? I think that you can read between lines of the past several months and conclude, “Probably not.”

We judge the US Homeland will face a persistent and evolving terrorist threat over the next three years. The main threat comes from Islamic terrorist groups and cells, especially al-Qa’ida, driven by their undiminished intent to attack the Homeland and a continued effort by these terrorist groups to adapt and improve their capabilities.

Again, no surprises. The estimate does point out, echoing testimony by the country’s top intelligence analyst last week, that Al Qaeda has “protected or regenerated key elements of hits Homeland attack capability, including: a safehaven in the Pakistan Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA)…”

In all, the one-and-a-half pages of unclassified nuggets aren’t any more specific than what intelligence officials have put out for public consumption in the past year.

But there was one tantalizing bit at the end. The estimate seemed to say that the intelligence agencies need to better position themselves to counter the Internet as a tool for terrorism. In a section devoted to “technological advances” (read: the Internet, communications technologies, etc.) that continue to let “even small numbers of alienated people find and connect with one another, the authors drop this paragraph:

The ability to detect broader and more diverse terrorist plotting in this environment
will challenge current US defensive efforts and the tools we use to detect and disrupt
plots. It will also require greater understanding of how suspect activities at the local
level relate to strategic threat information and how best to identify indicators of
terrorist activity in the midst of legitimate interactions.

Let me read between the lines here a bit. “The ability to detect broader and more diverse terrorist plotting in this environment…” Here, they’re talking about picking up on the signals of an attack–online chatter, rhetoric on jihadi Web sites, but also message traffic, probably money transfers. We’ve known for a long time that the intelligence agencies focus on the Web and online transactions to detect terrorist patterns.

But to the second point, this “will challenge current US defensive efforts and the tools we use to detect and disrupt plots;” that strikes me as a pretty candid admission. It’s not like the intelligence agencies are saying, “We can’t detect plotting on the Internet,” but they’re clearly pointing out this is an area of concern, and one that’s going to keep putting counterterrorism specialists through their paces.

In light of this challenge, the agencies will need “greater understanding of how suspect activities at the local level relate to strategic threat information.” This strikes me as a clear reference to the use of fusion centers, which are supposed to marry local intelligence with the global threat picture. This could be seen as a shot at the Homeland Security Department. Theoretically, it’s DHS‘ job to put those two pieces together–local and global–but it has never really worked out that way. Most of this integration goes on at the National Counterterrorism Center, and the intelligence agencies hold sway there. The fusion centers themselves, while nominally under DHS‘ purview, are, in my experience, FBI-led affairs, with strong ties to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. It’s not clear whether this part of the estimate could be read as a move to underscore that this intelligence fusion is really the intelligence community’s job, or as a signal to DHS that they need to step into this role more forcefully. I have to conclude, though, based on my reporting, that it’s the former. This is a clear signal that the intelligence community sees fusion centers, and in the integration of local, national, and global threat reporting, as a vital part of domestic security.

Finally, the estimate says the intelligence agencies must understand “how best to identify indicators of terrorist activity in the midst of legitimate interactions.” That’s the false-positive, false-negative challenge in a nut shell. How do you scan all this activity–whether online or in the physical world–and determine what is and isn’t suspicious? This is an area of particular interest for me, and I’ve been writing about it for years. I think it’s most interesting that, in an NIE devoted to terrorist threats to the Untied States, officials chose to point out this challenge. Clearly, it weighs heavily on their minds.

Tom Fingar, the deputy director of national intelligence for analysis, is delivering a “global security assessment” to the House Armed Services Committee today. In his prepared remarks, just released, Fingar singles out Pakistan as the current home base for Al Qaeda, which he calls “the terrorist organization that poses the greatest threats to U.S. interests, including to the homeland.”

We have captured or killed numerous senior al-Qa’ida operatives, but we also have seen that al-Qa’ida’s core elements are resilient. They continue to plot attacks against our Homeland and other targets with the objective of inflicting mass casualties. They continue to maintain active connections and relationships that radiate outward from their leaders hiding in Pakistan to affiliates throughout the Middle East, North and East Africa, and Europe.

Fingar’s remarks echo the assessment senior intelligence officials have put out—on background with journalists—in the past few months: Al Qaeda has re-grouped, with a new cadre of middle and senior management, in the tribal areas of Pakistan. The foiled plot to blow up multiple passenger jets flying from the U.K. to the U.S. last year was linked back to Al Qaeda leaders in Pakistan, intelligence officials have said.

The political ramifications of a resurgent Al Qaeda in Pakistan are huge for the Bush administration. One need only imagine the political price the president would have paid had Al Qaeda succeeded in its attempts to kill thousands of airline passengers , and if the brain trust for that plot were found to have been hiding out in Pakistan, with the full knowledge of the White House and our intelligence service. The planes bombing plot was designed to rival, if not exceed, the 9/11 attacks, at least in terms of human casualties.

In his prepared remarks, Fingar added, rather ominously, that “Pakistan, despite its ongoing efforts [to crack down in Islamic militants], continues to face terrorism’s many challenges, while that country also raises other concerns for us.” He also said Pakistan can expect harder times to come:

With tribal opposition to the US military presence in Afghanistan and Iraq widespread and elections expected later this year, the situation will become even more challenging—for President Musharraf and for the US.

• Moreover, democracy has not been fully restored since the Army took power in 1999 and Musharraf’s suspension of Pakistan’s Chief Justice in March has brought thousands of protesters into the streets and increased public demand for a fully democratic system.

It’s important to remember that, last February, Vice President Cheney made an unannounced visit to Islamabad to show the United States’ displeasure with Musharraf’s apparently deficient efforts to squelch the Al Qaeda resurgence. Who did Cheney take with him? The CIA’s No. 2, Steve Kappes, a beloved career operations officer who has worked in Pakistan and knows the Middle East intimately. Undoubtedly, along with the United States’ insistence that Pakistan do more was an offer to help them do just that, through increased participation with our clandestine service.