Awkward questions loom for Pakistan

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The killing of Osama bin Laden in a garrison city, home to Pakistan's top army staff college, has posed embarrassing questions for the country's military leadership, report agencies. Barack Obama, US president, was careful to emphasise Pakistan's co-operation in Sunday's strike against bin Laden but focus has intensified on his sanctuary close to a military cantonment two hours' drive from the capital, Islamabad. The al-Qaeda leader's refuge in the city of Abbottabad has highlighted fears about Pakistan's ambivalence towards terrorism and its highly conflicted view of militancy. Such a conspicuous location, close to Pakistan's equivalent of the UK's Sandhurst military academy, also appears to confirm US secretary of state Hillary Clinton's suspicions that top officials in Pakistan knew where bin Laden was hiding. Pakistan's critics often claim that the military and intelligence establishment have sympathies with Islamist militants and that they are blind to the perils of global terror outfits. Many Pakistanis made no secret of their admiration for bin Laden's anti-western aggression. On Monday, they were openly lamenting his demise. Abbottabad is home to the prestigious Kakul Pakistan military academy, whose graduates include General Ashfaq Pervez Kayani, the chief of army staff, and Lieutenant General Ahmed Shuja Pasha, head of inter-services intelligence. Many of the operations in the border region with Afghanistan are planned from the military nerve-centre. Report from Abbottabad adds: Pakistan's president said Tuesday accusations that his nation extends safe haven to extremists were "baseless" and insisted its long-term help was crucial to the US triumph in gunning down Osama bin Laden. In an opinion piece written for Tuesday's Washington Post, Asif Ali Zardari said the criticism was groundless. "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," Zardari said. "Such baseless speculation may make exciting cable news, but it doesn't reflect fact." Zardari acknowledged that the US commandos carried out the Abbottabad raid without Pakistani collaboration-but stressed that Islamabad had initially helped to identify the Al-Qaeda courier who led them to bin Laden. Overall, he wrote, "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". However, Pakistan's main intelligence agency, the ISI, has said it is embarrassed by its failures on al-Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden. An ISI official told the BBC the compound in Abbottabad where Bin Laden was killed by US forces on Sunday had been raided in 2003. But the compound "was not on our radar" since then, the official said. He gave new details of the raid, saying Bin Laden's young daughter had said she saw her father shot. The ISI official told the the news agency in Islamabad that the compound in Abbottabad, just 100km (62 miles) from the capital, was raided when under construction in 2003. It was believed an al-Qaeda operative, Abu Faraj al-Libi, was there. But since then "the compound was not on our radar, it is an embarrassment for the ISI", the official said. "We're good, but we're not God." He added: "This one failure should not make us look totally incompetent. Look at our track record. For the last 10 years, we have captured Taliban and al-Qaeda in their hundreds - more than any other countries put together." The compound is just a few hundred metres from the Pakistan Military Academy. The ISI official also gave new or differing accounts of some of the events of Sunday's raid. There were 17-18 people in the compound at the time of the attack The Americans took away one person still alive, possibly a Bin Laden son. Those who survived the attack included a wife, a daughter and eight to nine other children, not apparently Bin Laden's, all had their hands tied by the Americans The surviving Yemeni wife said they had moved to the compound a few months ago Bin Laden's daughter, aged 12 or 13, saw her father shot. The official said it was thought the Americans wanted to take away the surviving women and children but had to abandon the plan when one of the helicopters malfunctioned. The helicopter was destroyed by the special forces unit. The US has not commented on anyone it captured or had planned to capture, other than saying it had taken Bin Laden's body. The ISI official said the organisation had recovered some documents from the compound. Meanwhile, the US will aim to destroy al Qaeda's central organisation now hat its leader Osama bin Laden has been killed and its capabilities degraded by US operations, a top White House advisor said on Tuesday. Since the 2001 attacks on New York and Washington, al Qaeda has spawned affiliated groups in the Middle East and North Africa and inspired attacks by so-called home-grown militants in Europe and the United States. But White House counterterrorism chief John Brennan said bin Laden's death was the latest in a series of US operations that have delivered "severe body blows" to al Qaeda's central network in Pakistan and Afghanistan over the past year.