No evidence ISI, Pak Army knew about Osama bin Laden: Mullen

MULLEN -PAK
From Lalit K Jha
Washington, Jun 15 (PTI) There is no evidence so far
that anybody in a senior position in Pakistan Army or ISI had
any knowledge about the presence of Osama bin Laden at a safe
house in an Islamabad suburb, a top Pentagon official has
said.
"I'm privy now to an awful lot of what we've seen as a
result of what he had in his, where he was living, and I just
haven't seen anything yet that would confirm that anybody in a
senior position had any idea he was there," Admiral Mike
Mullen, Chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, told the
Charlie Rose show in an interview Tuesday.
"...I just haven't seen anything that would lead me to
believe, any evidence that the ISI knew about it, that the Pak
military knew about it," he said.
The top Pentagon official said that he has seen
evidence that bin Laden lived at the Abbottabad compound for
five years.
He said the US raid on bin Laden's safe house was the
culmination of the focus that America had put on finding and
capturing or killing the top al-Qaeda leadership
"When we went in, certainly he's been the number one
target for us for a long time, but when we went in, the status
of al-Qaeda has been significantly damaged over the course of
the last two or three years," he said.
"So they're a much different organisation than they
were when President Obama came in. But we have been focused on
this for a decade."
"This was the best -- certainly I'd ever seen --
action between the CIA and the Pentagon. And there were other
agencies involved as well," he said.
Mullen said the US has brought as much pressure and
discussion as it could on Pakistan to take action to eliminate
that threat.
"That's just part of what we're going through with
them right now. From an al-Qaeda standpoint, what the Pakistan
leadership tells me -- the military leadership -- is that they
don't want them there either.
"And you know, we continue to work through the
relationship in terms of how we work together to eliminate
that threat. I think Omar and Quetta -- the whole Taliban
thing -- and see, you can extend this to the Haqqani network,
which is the Taliban network which focuses on Eastern
Afghanistan," Mullen said. PTI LKJ
KAP