IF anyone had thought that the 'do more' phrase had gone out of fashion from the Bush administration's vocabulary, Friday's statement of US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice should prove him wrong. At a joint press conference with Australian Foreign Minister Stephen Smith held at Perth, she called upon Pakistan to 'do more' to check the rising menace of terrorism in the tribal region. While acknowledging that the North West Frontier was difficult to handle, she observed that the consequences of not rooting out the "hotbed of terrorism" there went far beyond the area, and were of regional as well as international concern. Ever since the Americans found to their dismay that despite the ruthless use of military might to curb resistance in Afghanistan, their troubles have continued to grow, they and their NATO-led allies and the puppet Karzai regime have been pointing a finger at Pakistan's tribal region as the mainstay of the resistance, They had nothing to say, though, to Islamabad's reasonable response that while it was doing its best to stop crossborder infiltration and had set up 1,000 odd checkposts for this purpose, the coalition and Afghan armies were at quite a distance from the border and had merely one-tenth of the number of checkposts. That it was an unruly place where force had never paid off (failure of military operations undertaken on US insistence, for instance) and the inhabitants, who had family ties with their co-ethnic Pushtuns across the border, had felt outraged at the deaths of civilian population, were additional hurdles to containing militancy there. Dr Rice must realise that the problem is not so simple that it could be sorted out with Pakistan's 'doing more'. The reluctant NATO countries have to change their attitude and commit their troops to 'dangerous' zones. And the US has to explain why it has not yet put in place the much publicised reconstruction opportunity zones even after the lapse of two years and a half when they were announced.