Islamabad: Pakistan has described as ’’disquieting’’ CIA chief Leon Panetta’s
revelation that no intelligence about the US raid that killed Osama bin Laden
was shared with Islamabad for fear that the operation would be jeopardised.
"Most of these things that have happened in terms of global anti-terror,
Pakistan has played a pivotal role... So it’s a little disquieting when we have
comments like this," Foreign Secretary Salman Bashir said.
Bashir told the BBC that Pakistan had a "pivotal role" in fighting terrorism.
He said Panetta was entitled to his views but Pakistan had cooperated
extensively with the US.
In his first interview with Time magazine since leading the operation that
resulted in the killing of bin Laden near the Pakistani garrison city of
Abbottabad, Panetta said US officials feared Pakistan could have undermined the
mission by leaking word to its targets.
Bin Laden was shot dead during the raid by helicopter-borne US special forces
early on Monday.
Bashir said the compound in Abbottabad, where bin Laden was found, had been
identified as suspicious some time ago by Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence
agency.
It took the CIA’s greater resources to determine that it was the al-Qaeda
leader’s hidout, he said.
The principle of sovereignty should be observed, Mr Bashir added, and even
though this time his government understood an exception had been made for a
unilateral operation against such a high value target, the exception, the
foreign minister said, could not become a rule.
This was not the time to enter into recriminations, he told the BBC, and
Pakistan did not need to prove its credentials in the war on terror.
Pakistan’s Foreign Office yesterday issued a statement that said the
country’s civil and military leadership had no prior information of the US raid,
which it described as an "unauthorised unilateral action" that should not be
repeated. Online
