President Asif Ali Zardari said that Pakistan-US cooperation ultimately led to the elimination of Osama bin Laden, and noted with satisfaction that the “source of the greatest evil of the new millennium” had been silenced. In an article published in the Washington Post on Tuesday, Zardari vowed to continue Pakistan’s fight against terrorists and underlined that the country had been the biggest victim of terror.
Underneath a headline reading “Pakistan did its part”, he added: “We in Pakistan take some satisfaction that our early assistance in identifying an al Qaeda courier ultimately led to this day.” The president also took issue with a section of the US press for suggesting that his country lacked vitality in pursuing terrorism and actually protected the terrorists it claimed to be going after. “Such baseless speculation may make exciting cable news, but it doesn’t reflect fact,” Zardari wrote in the article.
Pakistan, he stated, 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,” wrote the president. “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 civilised world,” he added.
Zardari said bin Laden was not found “anywhere we had anticipated he would be, but now he is gone”. He said for him, justice against bin Laden was not just political, it was also personal because terrorists had murdered his wife, former premier Benazir Bhutto. “Twice he tried to assassinate my wife. In 1989 he poured $50 million into a no-confidence vote to topple her first government. She said that she was bin Laden’s worst nightmare: a democratically elected, progressive, moderate, pluralistic female leader. She was right, and she paid for it with her life,” wrote Zardari.
Zardari said the Pakistan government endorsed the words of President Obama and appreciated “the credit he gave us Sunday night for the successful operation in Khyber Pakhtunkhawa”. The president said that only hours after bin Laden’s death, the Taliban had reacted by blaming the Pakistan government and calling for retribution against its leaders, specifically against him, but added that “we will not be intimated”.
