The administration of President Barack Obama of the United States has asked Pakistan to disclose names of their countrymen’s intelligence operatives, The New York Times reported.
Osama Bin Laden’s "hideout," a stone’s throw from Pakistan’s military establishment and 40 miles away from the Pakistani capital Islamabad, has shocked that for such close vicinity the world’s most wanted man was not found for almost a decade.
Despite close the US-Pakistani ties and the military support the US gives to Taliban-embattled country, both countries were not successful in knocking off Al Qaeda’s founder.
The US request signals distrust with its longtime ally Pakistan. According to the New York Times, the US is trying to decide on whether Pakistan’s top intelligence operatives had any contact with Bin Laden or his agents.
The officials also described a tense discussion between Pakistani officials and an American envoy who traveled to Pakistan on Monday.
US intelligence and diplomatic officials are now suspicious that there is a weak leak and that someone in Pakistan’s secret intelligence agency knew of Bin Laden’s whereabouts, and provided him with information, according to The Times.
The US officials expressed their deep frustration with Pakistani military and intelligence officials for their refusal over the years to identify members of the agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate, who were believed to have close ties to Bin Laden, the paper said.
"It’s hard to believe that Kayani and Pasha actually knew that bin Laden was there," a senior administration official said to The Times, referring to Pakistan’s army chief, General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, and the ISI director-general, Lieutenant General Ahmad Shuja Pasha. But "there are degrees of knowing, and it wouldn’t surprise me if we find out that someone close to Pasha knew."
One of Bin Laden’s three wives, the Yemeni one, who is now in Pakistani custody ever since the raid on Monday which left Bin Laden dead, told investigators that before moving in 2005 to the mansion in Abbottabad, the paper said, Bin Laden had been living with his family for nearly two and a half years in a small village, Chak Shah Mohammad, a little more than a mile southeast of the town of Haripur, on the main Abbottabad highway. The Times said. That would mean he left Pakistan’s rugged tribal region sometime in 2003, one of the unnamed officials told the paper, adding that he was living in the northern and more urban region ever since.
Meanwhile, during his visit in Paris, Prime Minister Syed Yousuf Raza Gilani said Pakistan cannot accept the US violating the country’s sovereignty but hoped the US-Pakistani relations to go back to normalcy, the Pakistani paper, The Nation newspaper reported on Saturday.
Mr. Gilani said that Pakistan has reservations over the US operation against Bin Laden, adding, there was no need to bypass Pakistan. He said Pakistan wanted respectful and equal relationship with the US.
Before the killing of Bin Laden, the US-Pakistan relations were fraying over the issue of Raymond Davis, the CIA agent who was bailed out on "blood-money" for killing Pakistani civilians whom he claimed that killed to protect himself.
Pakistan arrested 40 people suspected of having links to Osama Bin Laden in Abbottabad, the cantonment near the Pakistani capital of Islamabad, where US Special Forces killed the Al-Qaeda leader on May 1, Fox News Channel reported Friday.
It cited a report by the Open Source Center, a US government-sponsored monitoring site.
The arrests came after a search operation launched Thursday by Pakistani intelligence agencies and police in Abbottabad, the report said, adding that official sources called it the "second phase" of the operation that killed Bin Laden. Pakistan has acknowledged that it was not involved in the first phase—the search for, and killing of, Bin Laden.
Bin Laden was shot dead by a team of 79 US Navy SEALs in a compound in Abbottabad, a military town 35 miles from Islamabad, President Obama announced last Sunday. Al Qaeda confirmed their founder’s death Friday.
Pakistan found itself in the dock internationally for having allegedly failed to detect Bin Laden’s whereabouts.
Pakistan’s military admitted to intelligence "shortcomings" on pinpointing the Al-Qaeda chief’s location and ordered an investigation, reported Reuters.
The acknowledgement came after army Chief of Staff General Ashfaq Kayani convened a meeting of corps commanders, four days after Bin Laden was killed in Abbottabad.
While admitting [its] shortcomings" in developing intelligence on Bin Laden’s whereabouts, the meeting said "achievements" by military intelligence against Al-Qaeda and other terror groups were without parallel.
In Bin Laden’s case, the military said the CIA developed intelligence based on initial information provided by Pakistan’s Directorate of Inter-Services Intelligence but did not share further developments with them.
Debate in the US has focused on whether Pakistan was hiding Bin Laden for years in one of their country’s main military centers. CIA director Leon Panetta, in a May 3 interview with Time magazine, said US officials planning the raid "decided that any effort to work with the Pakistanis could jeopardize the mission" because "they might alert the targets."
Senator Carl Levin, Democrat of Michigan, and other US lawmakers have called for a review of aid to Pakistan, which in 2010 rose to $4.35 billion, according to the Congressional Research Service.
Pakistan, a traditional US ally in the region, has asked the US to henceforth notify its authorities whenever any covert mission was planned.