Pakistan ? Taliban forces tightened their grip on Pakistan’s Swat region Monday and continued resisting the military’s efforts to dislodge them from neighboring Buner, bringing a fragile peace accord closer to collapse and the volatile northwest region nearer to full-fledged conflict.

Yet even as the Taliban continued their rampage and rejected the government’s latest concession to their demands — the appointment of Islamic-law judges in Swat — Pakistan’s military leaders clung to hopes for a nonviolent solution, saying that security forces were “still exercising restraint to honor the peace agreement.”

Behind this strained hope for a peaceful solution lie an array of factors — competing military priorities, reluctance to fight fellow Muslims, lack of strong executive leadership and some internal sympathy for the insurgents — that analysts say have long prevented the Pakistani army from making a full-fledged assault on violent Islamist groups.