Pakistan President Asif Ali Zardari says the raid by US special forces to kill the world's most wanted terrorist Osama bin Laden deep inside his country was "not a joint operation."
In an opinion column titled "Pakistan did its part" published in the 'Washington Post', Zardari also said the whereabouts of the al-Qaeda leader, who was killed in the military garrison town of Abbottabad, about 120 km from Islamabad yesterday, was not known to the Pakistani authorities.
"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 civilized world," he said.
At a White House briefing, John Brennan, Deputy National Security Advisor for Counterterrorism and Homeland Security, said Islamabad was not informed about the operation until the US forces had left Pakistani airspace and that no Pakistani individuals were engaged in the operation.
"We did not contact the Pakistanis until after all of our people, all of our aircrafts were out of Pakistani airspace," he said at a White House briefing.
With Pakistan facing the heat on the presence of bin-Laden in its soil before being eliminated, Zardari said, "He(Osama) was not anywhere we had anticipated he would be, but now he is gone."
"Pakistan, perhaps the world’s greatest victim of terrorism, joins the other targets of al-Qaeda — the people of the US, Britain, Spain, Indonesia, Afghanistan, Turkey, Yemen, Kenya, Tanzania, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Algeria — in our satisfaction that the source of the greatest evil of the new millennium has been silenced, and his victims given justice," he said.
Against the backdrop of questions being raised on Pakistan's cooperation with the US in the war on terror, Zardari sought to take some credit for the killing of bin Laden, saying Pakistan can take "some satisfaction" that our "early assistance" in identifying an al-Qaeda courier ultimately led to this day.
"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. Such baseless speculation may make exciting cable news, but it doesn’t reflect fact.
Pakistan had as much reason to despise al-Qaeda as any nation. The war on terrorism is as much Pakistan’s war as as it is America’s. And though it may have started with bin Laden, the forces of modernity and moderation remain under serious threat," he said.
