Kabul, Afghanistan ? A top U.S. military commander Wednesday praised Pakistan’s government as “exceedingly cooperative” in the hunt for al-Qaida leaders believed holed up in Pakistan’s semi-autonomous border region.

While an ongoing push to ferret out Taliban and al-Qaida remnants on both sides of the porous border with Afghanistan has produced few results, Gen. Tommy Franks, who oversaw the military ouster of the Taliban from power, said he was “pleased with the cooperation” of President Pervez Musharraf’s government.

Gen. Tommy Franks, center, greets American troops at the U.S. base in Kandahar, Afghanistan. Franks told troops Wednesday that the countries in the coalition were committed to destroy the terrorist network and the Taliban in Afghanistan.

“Do we have work that we must do in that border area in the near future? Yes, we do,” Franks told reporters gathered at an Afghan national army training center just outside Kabul.

But “President Musharraf and his government have been exceedingly cooperative,” he said.

Pakistan’s government, caught between internal pressure to respect the traditionally semi-autonomous tribal areas along Afghanistan’s border and U.S. urging for a military push in the area, has moved cautiously in sending troops to the area.

Franks’ remarks, part of a visit to several military installations in Afghanistan, seemed designed to support that politically tenuous effort.

The Army commander, who heads the U.S. Central Command, also said Wednesday that U.S. forces intend to stick with their pursuit of any remaining Taliban and al-Qaida forces despite recent suggestions by Britain’s top coalition commander that the war is “all but done.”

“I’m not yet convinced the (al-Qaida) network is totally done,” Franks told U.S. troops in Kandahar. “As long as it’s not … we’re going to be here working.”

Coalition forces in Afghanistan have turned up a number of large caches of aging weapons during the past week in caves near the Pakistani border and elsewhere in the country. While the seizures have been large, many of the weapons “are so old they’re not really useable,” said Col. Wayland Parker, U.S. liaison to the international anti-terrorist coalition in Afghanistan.

The good news is “that if they’re relying on that stuff it tells you where they are resource-wise,” he said.

Snaring terrorist leaders believed hiding in Pakistan’s tribal border areas will be harder, Parker said, calling the area, “the Wild West, Dodge City.”

The Afghan-Pakistan border, longer than the U.S.-Mexican border, cuts through the middle of predominantly Pashtun tribal areas. Crossing the rugged border is a tradition. The hard-to-enforce boundary, combined with lingering Taliban sympathies in the region, Afghan-Pakistani rivalries and Pakistan’s anxiety about moving troops into the area, has so far foiled coalition efforts to trap al-Qaida leaders thought to be hiding there.

To capture the leaders “you’re going to have to have help from the Pakistanis, obviously, and also from the Afghans. And they’re going to have to work together, and that’s not always easy to arrange,” Parker said.