Finding OBL: Zardari insists Pakistan did its part

Presid­ent calls accusa­tions that Pakist­an extend­s safe haven to extrem­ists as "basele­ss".

ABBOTTABAD:

President Asif Ali Zardari has said accusations that Pakistan extends safe haven to extremists were “baseless” and insisted the country’s long-term help was crucial to the US triumph in gunning down Osama Bin Laden.

“Some in the US press have suggested that Pakistan lacked vitality in its pursuit of terrorism, or worse yet that we were disingenuous and actually protected the terrorists we claimed to be pursuing,” Zardari said in an opinion piece written for Tuesday’s Washington Post.”Such baseless speculation may make exciting cable news, but it doesn’t reflect fact.”

Zardari’s defence came after Washington warned it would probe how the al Qaeda kingpin managed to live in ‘undetected luxury’ in Pakistan.

“Pakistan has never been and never will be the hotbed of fanaticism that is often described by the media,” the president wrote.

Officials said DNA tests had proven conclusively that the man shot dead by US Special Forces in Abbottabad was indeed the terror mastermind behind the September 11, 2001 attacks.

US president Barack Obama’s top anti-terror adviser John Brennan said it was “inconceivable” that Bin Laden did not enjoy a support network in Pakistan.

However, the president insisted that Bin Laden “was not anywhere we had anticipated he would be.”

Zardari acknowledged that the US commandos carried out the Abbottabad raid without Pakistani collaboration – but stressed that Islamabad had initially helped to identify the al Qaeda courier who led them to Bin Laden.

“We in Pakistan take some satisfaction that our early assistance in identifying an al-Qaeda courier ultimately led to this day.” Overall, he wrote, “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”.

The president acknowledged that although it started with Bin Laden, the war against terrorism has not been won yet, “but we now clearly can see the beginning of the end”. The war on terrorism is as much Pakistan’s war as it is America’s, he added.

In an interview with AFP, Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani sidestepped questions over how Osama bin Laden had remained undetected.

Referring to the late terrorism mastermind as “that gentleman”, Gilani said only that the villa housing Bin Laden was in a “remote area” out of reach of the army’s main city bases.

With Pakistan’s main Taliban faction vowing vengeance, the US said on Tuesday it was closing its consulates in the cities of Lahore and Peshawar to the public until further notice.

The US State Department warned of the potential for reprisals against Americans, while CIA chief Leon Panetta said terrorist groups “almost certainly” would try to avenge Bin Laden.

With additional input by News Desk



Published in The Express Tribune, May 4^th, 2011.