US was concerned Pakistan ‘might alert the targets’

US OFFICIALS were concerned that Pakistan could jeopardise the Osama bin Laden operation and “might alert the targets,” CIA director Leon Panetta admitted yesterday.

In an interview with Time magazine, Panetta said his aides had 60%-80% confidence that bin Laden was in the compound.

The CIA ruled out working with Pakistan on the raid because “it was decided that any effort to work with the Pakistanis could jeopardise the mission: They might alert the targets,” Panetta said.

Pakistan’s president acknowledged for the first time that his security forces were left out of a US operation to kill bin Laden, but he did little to dispel questions over how the al-Qaida leader was able to live in comfort near Islamabad.

The revelation that bin Laden had 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.

“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 co-operation between the United States and Pakistan led up to the elimination of Osama bin Laden as a continuing threat to the civilised world.”

Pakistan has faced enormous international scrutiny since bin Laden 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 counter-terrorism chief John Brennan told a briefing that Pakistan was not informed of the raid until after all US aircraft were out of Pakistani airspace.

Senior US, Pakistani and Afghan officials later held a previously scheduled meeting in Islamabad to discuss the fight against militancy in Afghanistan and Pakistan but deflected questions about the bin Laden operation.

“Who did what is beside the point ... This issue of bin Laden is history,” Pakistani foreign secretary Salman Bashir told a joint news conference.

Marc Grossman, the US special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, said both sides wanted to move beyond recriminations and finger-pointing.

But irate US lawmakers earlier asked how it was possible for bin Laden to live in a populated area near a military training academy without anyone in authority knowing about it.

They said it was time to review aid to Pakistan. The US Congress has approved $20 billion for Pakistan in direct aid and military reimbursements partly to help Islamabad fight militancy since bin Laden masterminded the September 11, 2001 attacks.

“Our government is in fiscal distress. To make contributions to a country that isn’t going to be fully supportive is a problem for many,” said Senate Intelligence Committee chair Dianne Feinstein.

The White House acknowledged there was good reason for US lawmakers to demand to know whether bin Laden had been “hiding in plain sight” and to raise questions about US aid to Islamabad.

“Certainly his location there outside of the capital raises questions. We are talking to the Pakistanis about this,” said Brennan, adding it was “inconceivable that bin Laden did not have a support system in the country that allowed him to remain there for an extended period of time”.

There were no protests and there was no extra security in Islamabad yesterday, 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.

Zardari has made no address to the people of a country where anti-American sentiment runs high, prompting one Twitter user to tweet: “Most wanted man is killed on Pakistani soil and the Pres doesn’t address his people, instead writes an op-ed for USA.”

President Barack Obama and his staff followed the raid minute-by-minute via a live video feed in the White House situation room, and there was relief when the commandos, including members of the elite Navy SEALs, stormed the compound.

“We got him,” the president said, according to Brennan, after the mission was over.

Under bin Laden, al-Qaida militants struck targets from Indonesia to the European capitals of Madrid and London. But it was the September 11 attacks, in which al-Qaida militants used hijacked planes to strike at economic and military symbols of American might and killed nearly 3,000 people, that brought bin Laden to global infamy.

Unauthorised action

PAKISTAN has criticised the American raid that killed Osama bin Laden as an “unauthorised unilateral action” and warned Washington not to launch similar operations in the future.

The comments laid bare the tensions triggered by Monday’s attack, which came at time when US-Pakistani ties were already near rock bottom.

The Pakistani government has been assailed by domestic critics, while the fact bin Laden was living in a house in a military town not far from the capital has led to international suspicions that elements of Pakistan’s security forces may have been harbouring him.

“The Government of Pakistan further affirms that such an event shall not serve as a future precedent for any state, including the US,” adding such actions can sometimes constitute a “threat to international peace and security”.