Embarrassed by the US raid that killed Osama Bin Laden near a military training academy deep inside Pakistan, the country's army and intelligence setup took refuge by dismissing it as an "intelligence failure".
In an apparent damage control exercise a day after the sensational raid, the army struggled to explain the role, if any, it played in the hunt for the world's most wanted man.
"We had been looking for him in no-go areas, unaware that he was living so close to an installation of ours.Yes, it is an intelligence failure," a senior unnamed military official told the Dawn newspaper, giving a new spin.
An unnamed senior army officer acknowledged to The News daily that the US would have gone to any length to get the man behind the 9/11 terror attacks.
"The stakes were very, very high. In order to reach Osama, the US would disregard anything standing in its way: whether Pakistanis, the army, intelligence, anything," the officer was quoted as saying.
The officer further said there was "no intelligence-sharing this time" and that the US had carried out a "very swift operation".
Pakistan had its limitations and, in the final analysis, was better off with the death of Bin Laden, he contended.
As Pakistani military officials tried to play down the killing of Bin Laden in a compound less than a kilometre from the Pakistan Military Academy, "they found very few takers of their explanation", the Dawn reported.
"This was hardly surprising as it is hard to believe that the paranoid security agencies never conducted a reconnaissance of the vicinity of their main training facility during times when military installations faced a continuous threat of terrorist attacks," the report said.
"Odder still is the fact that the military authorities or the intelligence sleuths never felt the need to find out who was using a heavily guarded structure that was protected by barbed wires and fortified walls and had the extra precaution of surveillance cameras," it said.
The Dawn reported it was "tragically comical" that Bin Laden's compound was a stone's throw from the spot where army chief General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani attended a parade around a week ago and said publicly that his forces had broken the "terrorist backbone".
Though Pakistani military officials insisted they had not been taken on board by the US about the operation to get Bin Laden, the Dawn noted that a "flurry of activity that took place in the past week or so indicates that something was up".
