Unrelenting militant attacks in northern India's disputed Kashmir state are pushing security forces into a corner.
They have begun to question the government's decision to extend the ceasefire by three months, until the end of May, without taking any other significant political initiatives.
Military officers on counterinsurgency operations across Kashmir said Muslim militant "hits" were becoming bolder, indicating a loss of control by the security forces in the 12-year civil war, which has claimed more than 30,000 lives.
More than 110 members of the security forces have died since the unilateral declaration of the ceasefire last November and an inordinately high number have been injured.
"They [the militants] are carrying the war into our camps," a unit commander based near the state's summer capital, Srinagar, said. While the government contemplates its next move, soldiers are getting killed daily, he added.
Over the past four months, the ceasefire has created a situation where "area dominance" by the security forces has been severely eroded, forcing them into highly defensive formations.
"The army is simply not trained to sit back and wait for the enemy," a senior officer said. Their training in counterinsurgency is to seek and destroy.
Earlier this month a suicide squad from the Pakistan-backed Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT or Army of the Pure) militant group attacked an army camp in the border town of Baramulla, northern Kashmir, killing two soldiers and wounding eight others.
In two earlier attacks LeT insurgents killed 17 policemen in an ambush in Jammu's Rajouri district, the biggest militant strike since the ceasefire began.
Two days later a two-member suicide team stormed an army base at Baramulla with rockets and automatic weapons, killing four soldiers. The militants died in the ensuing firefight. A few days earlier a Territorial Army convoy was ambushed in which its commanding officer died and the area commander was severely wounded.
Muslim-majority Kashmir is divided between nuclear rivals India and Pakistan and claimed by both. It has been the cause of two of the three wars the neighbours have fought since independence in 1947. India blames Pakistan for fuelling Kashmir's insurgency, a claim Islamabad denies.
Official sources said insurgent groups had also used the ceasefire period to liquidate reliable informers in addition to killing off a string of Ikhwanis, or surrendered militants who were a credible source of intelligence for the security forces.
United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan arrives in Delhi tomorrow from Pakistan, where he dismissed Islamabad's demand that the UN should enforce the 53-year-old Security Council resolution for a referendum in Kashmir to resolve its future. Pakistan has steadfastly wanted a referendum, while India has opposed it, claiming that it has been superseded by subsequent treaties.
Eight people were killed and several wounded when gunmen opened fire at worshippers in a mosque in the eastern Pakistani city of Lahore late yesterday, police said.
"Three men opened fire at the worshippers offering prayers in a Sunni Muslim mosque and killed eight people, while more than a dozen were injured," Lahore police Deputy Inspector General Javed Noor said.
Police suspect the hand of the minority Shia extremist group, Sipah-i-Mohammad Pakistan (SMP).