Pak in bind over US raid
Zardari writes ‘it wasn’t a joint ops’; US lawmakers seek cut in aid
Pakistan President Asif Ali Zaradari acknowledged for the first time on Tuesday that his security forces were left out of a US operation to kill Osama bin Laden, but he did little to dispel questions over how the al-Qaeda leader was able to live in comfort near Islamabad.
But the US refused to believe that bin Laden had no support system in Pakistan, which hit back saying the success of the Abbottabad operation was because of its cooperation.
The Pakistan government went a step further to call the commando operation an “unauthorised, unilateral action” without its knowledge, but remained silent on the point whether its military establishment and intelligence agencies knew about bin Laden’s presence in Abbottabad and whether he was enjoying any support system.
A Pakistan government statement late in the night said its army and intelligence agencies have played a vital role in breaking the back of al-Qaeda and other terrorist groups in the country as well as in the world.
In New York, CIA Director Leon Panetta told “Time” magazine that Pakistani officials were kept deliberately out of loop by the US in its operation to get Osama bin Laden as it feared they might “alert” the targets and “jeopardise” the mission.
While there was a mood of triumph in Washington following the successful accomplishment of the mission against bin Laden, who was code-named “Geronimo”, Pakistan distanced itself from having any role in the US operation.
However, giving a new version, Pakistan’s Ambassador to US Husain Haqqani acknowledged that bin Laden had “support system” in the country, but insisted that the government had no hand in shielding him.
“He was not anywhere we had anticipated he would be, but now he is gone,” Pakistan President Asif Ali Zardari wrote in an opinion piece in “The Washington Post”, without offering further defence against accusations his security services should have known where bin Laden was hiding.
“Although the events of Sunday were not a joint operation, a decade of cooperation and partnership between the United States and Pakistan led up to the elimination of Osama bin Laden as a continuing threat to the civilised world,” Zardari wrote.
It was the first substantive public comment by any Pakistani civilian or military leader on the airborne raid by US special forces on bin Laden’s compound in the early hours of Monday.
“The New York Times” reported that the commando team had raced into the Pakistani night from a base in Jalalabad, just across the border in Afghanistan.
The goal was to get in and get out before Pakistani authorities detected the breach of their territory by what were to them unknown forces and reacted with possibly violent results. The revelation that bin Laden was holed up in a compound in the military garrison town of Abbottabad, possibly for years, prompted many US lawmakers to demand a review of the billions of dollars in aid Washington gives to nuclear-armed Pakistan.
Senator Joe Lieberman said there are going to be a lot of questions raised about what people in the Pakistani intelligence agency particularly knew or should have known about the presence of Osama in Pakistan. “For years, you know, the Pakistani officials have said to us he’s not in Pakistan; he’s in the mountains in Waziristan between Pakistan and Afghanistan.”
The Pakistani Taliban has warned that it would target Pakistan and the US to avenge the killing. In an audio message issued to the Pakistani media from an undisclosed location, Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan spokesman Ahsanullah Ahsan said his group would take revenge for his killing. He warned that Pakistan’s leaders, Zardari, and the army were on the Taliban’s hit list and would be their “first targets.”
Pakistan has faced enormous international scrutiny since Osama was killed, with questions over whether its military and intelligence agencies were too incompetent to catch him or knew all along where he was hiding. White House counterterrorism chief John Brennan told a briefing that Pakistan was not informed of the raid until after all US aircraft were out of Pakistani airspace.
The White House acknowledged there was good reason for lawmakers to demand whether Osama had been “hiding in plain sight” and to raise questions about US aid to Islamabad.
There were no protests and there was no extra security in Islamabad on Tuesday, just a sense of embarrassment or indifference that bin Laden had managed to lie low for so long in Abbottabad. “The failure of Pakistan to detect the presence of the world’s most-wanted man here is shocking,” the daily ‘News’ said in an editorial.
Despite the finger pointing at Islamabad, US and British officials said they would continue working with Pakistan to combat militancy. China, a strong ally of Pakistan, defended Islamabad against accusations it had done too little against terrorism.
