Washington: US President Barack Obama has made it clear that Washington will again launch a unilateral military operation inside Pakistan if it finds another key terrorist hiding in the country.
In an interview with the BBC, Obama said that the United States has killed "more terrorists on Pakistani soil than anywhere else."
The then al-Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden, who had evaded capture for a decade, was killed on May 2 in a top-secret US unilateral military operation in Pakistan's Abbottabad city.
When asked if he would proceed with another Abbottabad-like operation if the US locates another very high value target at the top of al-Qaeda, Taliban leader Mullah Omar, any other top terrorist on Pakistani soil or some other sovereign territory, Obama replied: "I've always been clear to the Pakistanis. And I'm not the first administration to say this, that our job is to secure the United States."
"We are very respectful of the sovereignty of Pakistan. But we cannot allow someone who is actively planning to kill our people or our allies' people. We can't allow those kind of active plans to come to fruition without us taking some action," he said.
"And our hope is and our expectation is that we can achieve that in a way that is fully respectful of Pakistan's sovereignty. But I had made no secret. I had said this when I was running for the presidency, that if I had a clear shot at Bin Laden... we'd take it," he added.
Talking about bin Laden's discovery in a Pakistani garrison city, Obama said the US does not have any clear understanding of the level at which Pakistani officials or others knew about the al-Qaeda chief's presence there.
"What we know is that for him to have been there for five or six years probably required some sort of support external to the compound. Whether that was non-governmental, governmental, a broad network, or a handful of individuals, those are all things that we are investigating, but we're also asking the Pakistanis to investigate," he added. ANI
