Osama hiding in Pakistan's tribal areas: US

Washington, Apr 8 (PTI) Taliban and al-Qaeda leaders,
including Osama bin Laden, are hiding in Pakistan's tribal
areas, where the US is fighting a war on terror, Vice
President Joe Biden said Wednesday.

"In the FATA, the western part of Pakistan in the
mountains on the Afghan border, that is a war on terror.
That's where al-Qaeda lives. That's where bin Laden is. That's
where the most radicalised part of the Taliban is," Biden told
Wolf Blitzer of the CNN in an interview.

"The situation we have as it relates to problems that
exist in other parts of the world, they aren't all related to
terror," he said in response to a question if the Obama
Administration has stopped use of the phrase "global war on
terror".

Biden asserted there is a war on terror.

"Terror is a legitimate threat. It is a threat that
comes from al-Qaeda and those organisations that have morphed
off of al-Qaeda, but there are other interests we have beyond
merely - for example, the situation in the Middle East is not
a global war on terror. But it matters to us mightily whether
or not we end up with an accommodation between the Israelis
and the Palestinians," he said.

The Vice President said Obama Administration is
concerned that al-Qaeda has been able to reconstitute itself
under the Bush administration in the mountains regions on the
border of Afghanistan and Pakistan.

"Up till now there has been no targeted policy that
has as its goal the elimination of that element of extremism
in the world directed at the United States of America," he
said.

However, Biden observed under the rubric of a global
war on terror, the Obama Administration has ended up a series
of policies that made no sense and made the US weaker, in his
view and that of Obama.

"And so, what we decided to do is look at things in
their discrete - as discrete problems. Here you have a
situation. It is not a global war on terror in Iraq. The
problem we have in Iraq now is leaving behind a government
where Sunnis, Kurds and Shia get along, where they can share
power and be stable, not a threat to their neighbours and
secure in their own boundaries," he argued.