Obama ratchets up pressure on Pakistan

US president says Bin Laden had ‘support network’ in the country.

WASHINGTON:

As the United States is ratcheting up pressure on Pakistan to explain how Osama bin Laden – the world’s most wanted man – could have lived under the noses of its military, President Barack Obama said on Sunday that the slain al Qaeda kingpin had a “support network” in Pakistan but it is not clear if the Pakistani government was involved.

The fact that Bin Laden turned up in Abbottabad, a stone’s throw from the Pakistan Military Academy Kakul has been greeted with incredulity.

“We think that there had to be some sort of support network for Bin Laden inside of Pakistan,” Obama said in his first public comment on the issue that has further strained the already frayed diplomatic relations between the two war allies.

“But we don’t know who or what that support network was. We don’t know whether there might have been some people inside of government, people outside of government, and that’s something that we have to investigate and, more importantly, the Pakistani government has to investigate,” Obama told the CBS show “60 Minutes,” according to excerpts of an interview released on Sunday.

Pakistan has promised a probe but rejected charges that extremists like Bin Laden are extended safe haven.

“They have indicated they have a profound interest in finding out what kinds of support networks Bin Laden might have had,” said Obama. “But these are questions that we’re not going to be able to answer three or four days after the event. It’s going to take some time for us to be able to exploit the intelligence that we were able to gather on site.”

But in stark contrast, a top aide of President Obama sought to take some heat off Pakistan, saying it had no evidence that Islamabad knew Bin Laden was living in the country before the Abbottabad raid.

One of Bin Laden’s widows, Amal Ahmed Abdulfattah, who is currently in Pakistan’s custody along with 15 other family members, told investigators that they had spent five years in Abbottabad.

US National Security Adviser Tom Donilon said that while the matter “needs to be investigated”, there was nothing to suggest the government or security establishment knew he was there.

Suspicion has deepened that Pakistan’s pervasive spy agency, the ISI, may have had ties with the al Qaeda leader – or that at least some of its agents did – a charge Islamabad denies.

“I can tell you directly that I’ve not seen evidence that would tell us that the political, the military, or the intelligence leadership had foreknowledge of Bin Laden,” Donilon told NBC’s “Meet the Press” when asked if Pakistan was guilty of harbouring the al Qaeda leader. Donilon said Pakistani officials also needed to provide US authorities with intelligence they had gathered from the compound where Bin Laden was killed and access to three wives who are in Pakistani custody.

But he added that despite difficulties in the US-Pakistani relationship, “We’ve also had to work very closely with Pakistan in our counter-terror efforts. More terrorists and extremists have been captured or killed in Pakistan than anyplace else.”

But Pakistan’s ambassador in Washington said Islamabad would have acted against Bin laden if it knew he was hiding in Abbottabad. Husain Haqqani said that his government was investigating the matter. “Heads will roll once the investigation has been completed,” Haqqani said. “Now if those heads are rolled on account of incompetence, we will share that information with you, and if, God forbid, somebody’s complicity is discovered, there will be zero tolerance for that as well.”

Published in The Express Tribune, May 9^th, 2011.