— Pakistan criticized the American raid that killed Osama bin Laden as an “unauthorized unilateral action,” laying bare the strains the operation has put on an already rocky alliance.
U.S. legislators along with the leaders of Britain and France questioned how the Pakistani government could not have known the al-Qaeda leader was living in a garrison town less than a two-hour drive from the capital and had apparently lived there for years.
, said the officer. “All of a sudden one failure makes us incompetent and 10 years of effort is overlooked.”
Al-Qaeda has been responsible for score of bloody attacks inside Pakistan, so on the face of it would seem strange for Islamabad to be sheltering bin Laden. Critics of Pakistan say that by keeping him on the run, Islamabad was ensuring that U.S. aid and weapons to the country kept flowing.
The Pakistani government said that since 2009 the ISI has shared information about the compound with the CIA and other Western intelligence agencies, and that intelligence indicating foreigners were in the Abbottabad area continued until mid-April.
In an essay published Tuesday by The Washington Post, Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari denied suggestions his country’s security forces may have sheltered bin Laden, and said their cooperation with the United States helped pinpoint him.
The raid followed months of deteriorating relations between the CIA and Pakistan’s intelligence service. Those strains came to a head in late January after a CIA contractor shot and killed two Pakistanis in what Washington said was self-defense.
In a statement, the Pakistani government said “this event of unauthorized unilateral action cannot be taken as a rule.”
“The government of Pakistan further affirms that such an event shall not serve as a future precedent for any state, including the U.S.,” it said, calling such actions a “threat to international peace and security.”
The statement may be partly motivated by domestic concerns. The government and army has come under criticism following the raid by those who have accused the government of allowing Washington to violate the country’s sovereignty. Islamabad has also been angered at the suspicions it had been sheltering bin Laden.
Associated Press writers Chris Brummitt, Munir Ahmed and Asif Shahzad contributed to this report from Islamabad.
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