Islamabad: President Asif Ali Zardari has said though killing of Osama Bin Laden was not a joint operation with Pakistan, cooperation between both the countries led up to the elimination of al Qaeda chief.
The president, writing in the Washington Post dispelled the impression that Pakistan was failing to take action against militants on its territory.
Zardari said the whereabouts of the al Qaeda leader, killed in a town some two hours north of Islamabad, and were not known to the Pakistani authorities.
“He was not anywhere we had anticipated he would be, but now he is gone,” he wrote.
The Pakistani leader said it was simply untrue to suggest that his country, as badly hit as any by bin Laden and his militants with 30,000 civilian deaths, was sluggish or unwilling to track down activists.
“Some in the US press have suggested that Pakistan lacked vitality in its pursuit of terrorism or, worse yet, that we were disingenuous and actually protected the terrorists we claimed to be pursuing,” he wrote.
“Such baseless speculation may make exciting cable news, but it doesn’t reflect fact.
Pakistan had as much reason to despise al-Qaeda as any nation. The war on terrorism is as much Pakistan’s war as it is America’s. And though it may have started with bin Laden, the forces of modernity remain under serious threat.”
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