CASPER
New member
Pakistan's president acknowledged for the first time on Tuesday that his security forces were left out of a U.S. operation to kill Osama bin Laden, but he did little to dispel questions over how the al Qaeda 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 U.S. 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 defense 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 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."
It was the first substantive public comment by any Pakistani civilian or military leader on the airborne raid by U.S. special forces on bin Laden's compound in the early hours of Monday.
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 counterterrorism chief John Brennan told a briefing that Pakistan was not informed of the raid until after all U.S. aircraft were out of Pakistani airspace.
Senior U.S., 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 Osama bin Laden is history," Pakistani Foreign Secretary Salman Bashir told a joint news conference.
Marc Grossman, the U.S. special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, said both sides wanted to move beyond recriminations and finger-pointing.
The revelation that bin Laden had holed up in a compound in the military garrison town of Abbottabad, possibly for years, prompted many U.S. 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 defense 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 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."
It was the first substantive public comment by any Pakistani civilian or military leader on the airborne raid by U.S. special forces on bin Laden's compound in the early hours of Monday.
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 counterterrorism chief John Brennan told a briefing that Pakistan was not informed of the raid until after all U.S. aircraft were out of Pakistani airspace.
Senior U.S., 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 Osama bin Laden is history," Pakistani Foreign Secretary Salman Bashir told a joint news conference.
Marc Grossman, the U.S. special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, said both sides wanted to move beyond recriminations and finger-pointing.