ISLAMABAD, PAKISTAN - U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, who has had her ups and downs in the news media, faced sharp rebukes in Pakistan on Friday, including one woman who accused the United States of conducting "executions without trial" in aerial drone strikes.

Slapping back, Clinton questioned Pakistan's commitment to fighting terrorists. "Somebody, somewhere in Pakistan must know where these people are," she said in an exchange almost as blunt as her exasperated comments a day earlier that Pakistani officials lacked the will to target Al-Qaida.

Clinton rolled with the punches this week in a media-saturated tour of Pakistan. She submitted to four roundtable interviews over three days in which Pakistan's leading journalists took their best shots at her, when they were not busy whacking one another.

By the time she left Islamabad on Friday, she appeared to have fought Pakistan's fourth estate to a draw.

Najam Sethi, editor in chief of the Daily Times, another English-language daily, said Clinton "did well to interact. She may not have made many new friends, but she certainly didn't make new enemies."

Engaging Pakistan's unruly media was perhaps Clinton's most important job on this visit. Newspapers and television drive public opinion more here than in many countries, and the coverage is sharply critical of the United States, partly because it sells papers and lifts ratings.

That poses a problem for the Obama administration, which needs Pakistan to join its campaign to fight extremists and stabilize Afghanistan. The recent spike in anti-American sentiment here was driven by media reports that a new aid bill would infringe on Pakistan's sovereignty.

"I will admit that clearly there is a lot of misperception, and perception is reality, so therefore it is up to us to try to set it straight," Clinton said in an interview with seven leading TV personalities.

Clinton's stormy visit, rocked at the start by a terrorist blast in Peshawar that killed 105 Pakistanis, revealed clear signs of strain between the two nations despite months of public insistence that they were on the same wavelength in the war on terror.

By speaking bluntly about the Pakistanis' failure to find and eliminate top Al-Qaida leaders -- eight years after they were run out of Afghanistan -- Clinton appeared to be trying to prod the Pakistanis to go beyond their current military campaign against internal militants in South Waziristan and target Al-Qaida, too.

During a live broadcast of an interview before a predominantly female audience of several hundred, one woman asked Clinton how she would define terrorism. "Is it the killing of people in drone attacks?" the woman asked.

Another man said bluntly: "Please forgive me, but I would like to say we've been fighting your war."

Before leaving Friday, Clinton appeared to slightly temper her earlier comments that some Pakistani officials knew where Al-Qaida's upper echelon has been hiding and had done little to target them.

"We don't know where, and I have no information that they know where, but this is a big government. You know, it's a government on many levels. Somebody, somewhere in Pakistan must know where these people are. And we'd like to know, because we view them as really at the core of the terrorist threat that threatens Pakistan, threatens Afghanistan, threatens us, threatens people all over the world," Clinton said.