Pakistan’s Prime Minister yesterday dismissed as “absurd” accusations that Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden must have benefited from official complicity or incompetence to hide out in his country.
Addressing Parliament in his first comments since bin Laden was killed by US Navy SEALs a week ago less than a mile from a top military academy, Yousuf Raza Gilani promised an investigation, to be led by a top Pakistani general.
Pakistan is a key Washington ally in the US-led war on terrorism, but with already tense relations stretched even further by the discovery of bin Laden, Mr Gilani issued thinly veiled criticisms of Washington.
He also bowed to domestic opposition of America’s covert action on Pakistani soil, saying: “Unilateralism runs the inherent risk of serious consequences.”
Mr Gilani said he had “full confidence in the high command of the Pakistan Armed Forces and the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI)” spy agency, both accused of failing to spot bin Laden hiding under their noses or even of protecting him.
“We are determined to get to the bottom of how, when and why about OBL’s presence in Abbottabad,” he said. “Allegations of complicity or incompetence are absurd. We emphatically reject such accusations.”
The premier has been under mounting pressure from both Washington and his own people after bin Laden was confirmed to have been living in an urban compound only 55 kilometres from Islamabad.
There has been an outcry in the US with President Barack Obama saying the terror kingpin must have had some kind of backing.
“We think that there had to be some sort of support network for bin Laden inside of Pakistan,” Mr Obama, speaking on the matter for the first time, told the CBS show “60 Minutes”.
“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.”
Helicopter-borne US Navy SEALs carried out a raid lasting less than 40 minutes, killing bin Laden and seizing a vast haul of data from the compound in Abbottabad on May 2. Senior US officials have said they had no proof that Islamabad knew about bin Laden’s hideout.
But outraged US lawmakers have voiced suspicion that elements of Pakistan’s military intelligence services must have known his whereabouts, and are demanding that billions of dollars in crucial American aid be suspended.
Similarly, Pakistanis are furiously asking whether their military was too incompetent to know bin Laden was there or, worse, conspired to protect him, while at the same time denouncing the perceived impunity of the American raid.
Mr Gilani sought to deflect the criticism, blaming “all intelligence agencies of the world” for the failure to locate bin Laden, and declaring: “Pakistan is not the birthplace of Al-Qaeda.”
In an allusion to US funding for Pakistan’s role in the 1990s war against Soviet troops in Afghanistan, which ultimately gave birth to the Taliban and Al-Qaeda, Mr Gilani said it was unfair for his country to take all the blame.
“Collectively, we must acknowledge facts and see our faces in the mirror of history. Pakistan alone cannot be held to account for flawed policies and blunders of others,” he said in his televised speech.