No evidence Pakistan knew of Osama: US

A week after the killing of al Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden, the United States said there was no proof Islamabad knew of his hideout, with US President Barack Obama saying bin Laden had a “support network” in Pakistan but it was not clear if the (Pakistani) government was involved.
“We think that there had to be some sort of support network for bin Laden inside of Pakistan,” Obama told the CBS show “60 Minutes”, according to excerpts of an interview released on Sunday. “But we don’t know who or what that support network was. We don’t know whether there might have been some people inside of government, people outside of government, and that’s something that we have to investigate and, more importantly, the Pakistani government has to investigate,” he added.
White House National Security Adviser Tom Donilon, meanwhile, told NBC’s Sunday talk show “Meet the Press” that there was “some support network in Abbottabad, Pakistan with the support of bin Laden”. “We haven’t seen evidence that the government knew about that. But they need to investigate that,” said Donilon. He stressed that, despite the fugitive terror chief hiding for years in a three-storey house near the capital Islamabad, “I’ve not seen evidence that would tell us that the political, the military, or the intelligence leadership had foreknowledge of bin Laden”.
“The second point though, is the fact which you’re alluding to, is that Osama bin Laden was in this town for six years, 35 miles away from the capitol of Pakistan – Islamabad – in a town that was known as a military town where they had an important military academy. This needs to be investigated,” Donilon added. Donilon, like US intelligence officials on Sunday, described the data haul from the raid as the richest terrorism treasure trove ever collected. “This is the largest cache of intelligence derived from the scene of any single terrorist,” he said. “It’s about the size, the CIA tells us, of a small college library. If we develop any information about planning or imminent threats, obviously, we will act on this,” he added.
Be he would not comment on specific potential threats, however, when asked about reports that bin Laden was planning US rail attacks for the 10th anniversary of the September 11 attacks, he responded that to the extent that “we hear information like that, we obviously make the appropriate notices and take the appropriate action”. While killing bin Laden, the 9/11 mastermind, was a significant US victory, Donilon cautioned: “We can’t declare al Qaeda strategically defeated. They continue to be a threat to the United States. But we have taken a really important milestone in terms of taking down this organisation.”
Donilon said it was “absolutely critical for us to remain vigilant as we continue to press this organisation”. He said the US was now eyeing the world’s new most wanted man: Ayman al-Zawahiri, long considered al Qaeda’s number two. But Donilon said Zawahiri, an Egyptian surgeon and global terrorism franchise master who has been hiding ever since the US declared its war on terror after the 9/11 attacks, “is not anywhere near the leader that Osama bin Laden was”. Al Qaeda “will have to work themselves through some sort of succession,” Donilon said, because killing bin Laden was “a real blow.”
The White House also said on Sunday that earlier plans for Obama to visit Pakistan this year were in doubt as the diplomatic fallout from the killing of Osama bin Laden intensified. Last October, Obama had committed himself to visiting Pakistan in 2011, but those plans now appear to be in flux as relations become increasingly strained by suspicions over who in Islamabad knew what about bin Laden’s whereabouts. “There is not a visit on his schedule at this point to go to Pakistan,” Donilon said.